Greg Egan - Singleton.pdf - Greg Egan - margozap

SingletonSingleton by Greg Egan “Oracle” | “Singleton” Miscellaneous

Fiction contents Back to home page | Site Map | Framed Site Map 2003 I

was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall railway station,

pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of my linear

algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the footpath. I

didn't give much thought to the reason they were standing there; I'd just

passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered outside.

But once I'd started to make my way around them, moving into an alley rather

than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were not

just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting off their

return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for myself exactly

what was holding their attention. Twenty metres down the alley, a man was

lying on his back on the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands,

while two men stood over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some

kind. At first I thought the sticks were pool cues, but then I noticed the

metal hooks on the ends. I'd only ever seen these obscure weapons before in

one other place: my primary school, where an appointed window monitor would

use them at the start and end of each day. They were meant for opening and

closing an old-fashioned kind of hinged pane when it was too high to reach

with your hands. I turned to the other spectators. “Has anyone called the

police?” A woman nodded without looking at me, and said, “Someone used their

mobile, a couple of minutes ago.” The assailants must have realised that the

police were on their way, but it seemed they were too committed to their task

to abandon it until that was absolutely necessary. They were facing away from

the crowd, so perhaps they weren't entirely reckless not to fear

identification. The man on the ground was dressed like a kitchen hand. He was

still moving, trying to protect himself, but he was making less noise than

his attackers; the need, or the ability, to cry out in pain had been beaten

right out of him. As for calling for help, he could have saved his breath. A

chill passed through my body, a sick cold churning sensation that came a

moment before the conscious realisation: I'm going to watch someone murdered,

and I'm going to do nothing. But this wasn't a drunken brawl, where a few

bystanders could step in and separate the combatants; the two assailants had

to be serious criminals, settling a score. Keeping your distance from

something like that was just common sense. I'd go to court, I'd be a witness,

but no one could expect anything more of me. Not when thirty other people had

behaved in exactly the same way. The men in the alley did not have guns. If

they'd had guns, they would have used them by now. They weren't going to mow

down anyone who got in their way. It was one thing not to make a martyr of

yourself, but how many people could these two grunting slobs fend off with

sticks? I unstrapped my backpack and put it on the ground. Absurdly, that made

me feel more vulnerable; I was always worried about losing my textbooks.

Think about this. You don't know what you're doing. I hadn't been in so much

as a fist fight since I was thirteen. I glanced at the strangers around me,

wondering if anyone would join in if I implored them to rush forward

together. But that wasn't going to happen. I was a willowy, unimposing

eighteen-year-old, wearing a T-shirt adorned with Maxwell's Equations. I had

no presence, no authority. No one would follow me into the fray. Alone, I'd

be as helpless as the guy on the ground. These men would crack my skull open

in an instant. There were half a dozen solid-looking office workers in their

twenties in the crowd; if these weekend rugby players hadn't felt competent

to intervene, what chance did I have? I reached down for my backpack. If I

wasn't going to help, there was no point being here at all. I'd find out what

had happened on the evening news. I started to retrace my steps, sick with

self-loathing. This wasn't kristallnacht. There'd be no embarrassing

questions from my grandchildren. No one would ever reproach me. As if that

were the measure of everything. “Fuck it.” I dropped my backpack and ran down

the alley. I was close enough to smell the three sweating bodies over the

stench of rotting garbage before I was even noticed. The nearest of the

attackers glanced over his shoulder, affronted, then amused. He didn't bother

redeploying his weapon in mid-stroke; as I hooked an arm around his neck in

the hope of overbalancing him, he thrust his elbow into my chest, winding me.

I clung on desperately, maintaining the hold even though I couldn't tighten

it. As he tried to prise himself loose, I managed to kick his feet out from

under him. We both went down onto the asphalt; I ended up beneath him. The

man untangled himself and clambered to his feet. As I struggled to right

myself, picturing a metal hook swinging into my face, someone whistled. I

looked up to see the second man gesturing to his companion, and I followed

his gaze. A dozen men and women were coming down the alley, advancing

together at a brisk walk. It was not a particularly menacing sight — I'd seen

angrier crowds with peace signs painted on their faces — but the sheer

numbers were enough to guarantee some inconvenience. The first man hung back

long enough to kick me in the ribs. Then the two of them fled. I brought my

knees up, then raised my head and got into a crouch. I was still winded, but

for some reason it seemed vital not to remain flat on my back. One of the

office workers grinned down at me. “You fuckwit. You could have got

killed.” The kitchen hand shuddered, and snorted bloody mucus. His eyes were

swollen shut, and when he lay his hands down beside him, I could see the

bones of his knuckles through the torn skin. My own skin turned icy, at this

vision of the fate I'd courted for myself. But if it was a shock to realise

how I might have ended up, it was just as sobering to think that I'd almost

walked away and let them finish him off, when the intervention had actually

cost me nothing. I rose to my feet. People milled around the kitchen hand,

asking each other about first aid. I remembered the basics from a course I'd

done in high school, but the man was still breathing, and he wasn't losing

vast amounts of blood, so I couldn't think of anything helpful that an

amateur could do in the circumstances. I squeezed my way out of the gathering

and walked back to the street. My backpack was exactly where I'd left it; no

one had stolen my books. I heard sirens approaching; the police and the

ambulance would be there soon. My ribs were tender, but I wasn't in agony. I'd

cracked a rib falling off a trail bike on the farm when I was twelve, and I

was fairly sure that this was just bruising. For a while I walked bent over,

but by the time I reached the station I found I could adopt a normal gait. I

had some grazed skin on my arms, but I couldn't have appeared too battered,

because no one on the train looked at me twice. That night, I watched the

news. The kitchen hand was described as being in a stable condition. I

pictured him stepping out into the alley to empty a bucket of fish-heads into

the garbage, to find the two of them waiting for him. I'd probably never

learn what the attack had been about unless the case went to trial, and as

yet the police hadn't even named any suspects. If the man had been in a fit

state to talk in the alley, I might have asked him then, but any sense that I

was entitled to an explanation was rapidly fading. The reporter mentioned a

student “leading the charge of angry citizens” who'd rescued the kitchen

hand, and then she spoke to an eye witness, who described this young man as

“a New Ager, wearing some kind of astrological symbols on his shirt.” I

snorted, then looked around nervously in case one of my housemates had made

the improbable connection, but no one else was even in earshot. Then the story

was over. I felt flat for a moment, cheated of the minor rush that fifteen

seconds' fame might have delivered; it was like reaching into a biscuit tin

when you thought there was one more chocolate chip left, to find that there

actually wasn't. I considered phoning my parents in Orange, just to talk to

them from within the strange afterglow, but I'd established a routine and it

was not the right day. If I called unexpectedly, they'd think something was

wrong. So, that was it. In a week's time, when the bruises had faded, I'd look

back and doubt that the incident had ever happened. I went upstairs to finish

my assignment. Francine said, “There's a nicer way to think about this. If

you do a change of variables, from x and y to z and z-conjugate, the

Cauchy-Riemann equations correspond to the condition that the partial

derivative of the function with respect to z-conjugate is equal to zero.” We

were sitting in the coffee shop, discussing the complex analysis lecture we'd

had half an hour before. Half a dozen of us from the same course had got into

the habit of meeting at this time every week, but today the others had failed

to turn up. Maybe there was a movie being screened, or a speaker appearing on

campus that I hadn't heard about. I worked through the transformation she'd

described. “You're right,” I said. “That's really elegant!” Francine nodded

slightly in assent, while retaining her characteristic jaded look. She had an

undisguisable passion for mathematics, but she was probably bored out of her

skull in class, waiting for the lecturers to catch up and teach her something

she didn't already know. I was nowhere near her level. In fact, I'd started

the year poorly, distracted by my new surroundings: nothing so glamorous as

the temptations of the night life, just the different sights and sounds and

scale of the place, along with the bureaucratic demands of all the

organisations that now impinged upon my life, from the university itself down

to the shared house groceries subcommittee. In the last few weeks, though,

I'd finally started hitting my stride. I'd got a part-time job, stacking

shelves in a supermarket; the pay was lousy, but it was enough to take the

edge off my financial anxieties, and the hours weren't so long that they left

me with no time for anything but study. I doodled harmonic contours on the

notepaper in front of me. “So what do you do for fun?” I said. “Apart from

complex analysis?” Francine didn't reply immediately. This wasn't the first

time we'd been alone together, but I'd never felt confident that I had the

right words to make the most of the situation. At some point, though, I'd

stopped fooling myself that there was ever going to be a perfect moment, with

the perfect phrase falling from my lips: something subtle but intriguing

slipped deftly into the conversation, without disrupting the flow. So now I'd

made my interest plain, with no attempt at artfulness or eloquence. She could

judge me as she knew me from the last three months, and if she felt no desire

to know me better, I would not be crushed. “I write a lot of Perl scripts,”

she said. “Nothing complicated; just odds and ends that I give away as

freeware. It's very relaxing.” I nodded understandingly. I didn't think she

was being deliberately discouraging; she just expected me to be slightly more

direct. “Do you like Deborah Conway?” I'd only heard a couple of her songs on

the radio myself, but a few days before I'd seen a poster in the city

announcing a tour. “Yeah. She's great.” I started thickening the conjugation

bars over the variables I'd scrawled. “She's playing at a club in Surry

Hills,” I said. “On Friday. Would you like to go?” Francine smiled, making no

effort now to appear world-weary. “Sure. That would be nice.” I smiled back.

I wasn't giddy, I wasn't moonstruck, but I felt as if I was standing on the

shore of an ocean, contemplating its breadth. I felt the way I felt when I

opened a sophisticated monograph in the library, and was reduced to savouring

the scent of the print and the crisp symmetry of the notation, understanding

only a fraction of what I read. Knowing there was something glorious ahead,

but knowing too what a daunting task it would be to come to terms with it. I

said, “I'll get the tickets on my way home.” To celebrate the end of exams

for the year, the household threw a party. It was a sultry November night,

but the back yard wasn't much bigger than the largest room in the house, so

we ended up opening all the doors and windows and distributing food and

furniture throughout the ground floor and the exterior, front and back. Once

the faint humid breeze off the river penetrated the depths of the house, it

was equally sweltering and mosquito-ridden everywhere, indoors and

out. Francine and I stayed close for an hour or so, obeying the distinctive

dynamics of a couple, until by some unspoken mutual understanding it became

clear that we could wander apart for a while, and that neither of us was so

insecure that we'd resent it. I ended up in a corner of the crowded back

yard, talking to Will, a biochemistry student who'd lived in the house for

the last four years. On some level, he probably couldn't help feeling that

his opinions about the way things were run should carry more weight than

anyone else's, which had annoyed me greatly when I'd first moved in. We'd

since become friends, though, and I was glad to have a chance to talk to him

before he left to take up a scholarship in Germany. In the middle of a

conversation about the work he'd be doing, I caught sight of Francine, and he

followed my gaze. Will said, “It took me a while to figure out what finally

cured you of your homesickness.” “I was never homesick.” “Yeah, right.” He

took a swig of his drink. “She's changed you, though. You have to admit

that.” “I do. Happily. Everything's clicked, since we got together.”

Relationships were meant to screw up your studies, but my marks were soaring.

Francine didn't tutor me; she just drew me into a state of mind where

everything was clearer. “The amazing thing is that you got together at all.” I

scowled, and Will raised a hand placatingly. “I just meant, when you first

moved in, you were pretty reserved. And down on yourself. When we interviewed

you for the room, you practically begged us to give it to someone more

deserving.” “Now you're taking the piss.” He shook his head. “Ask any of the

others.” I fell silent. The truth was, if I took a step back and contemplated

my situation, I was as astonished as he was. By the time I'd left my home

town, it had become clear to me that good fortune had nothing much to do with

luck. Some people were born with wealth, or talent, or charisma. They started

with an edge, and the benefits snowballed. I'd always believed that I had, at

best, just enough intelligence and persistence to stay afloat in my chosen

field; I'd topped every class in high school, but in a town the size of

Orange that meant nothing, and I'd had no illusions about my fate in

Sydney. I owed it to Francine that my visions of mediocrity had not been

fulfilled; being with her had transformed my life. But where had I found the

nerve to imagine that I had anything to offer her in return? “Something

happened,” I admitted. “Before I asked her out.” “Yeah?” I almost clammed up;

I hadn't told anyone about the events in the alley, not even Francine. The

incident had come to seem too personal, as if to recount it at all would be

to lay my conscience bare. But Will was off to Munich in less than a week,

and it was easier to confide in someone I didn't expect to see again. When I

finished, Will bore a satisfied grin, as if I'd explained everything. “Pure

karma,” he announced. “I should have guessed.” “Oh, very scientific.” “I'm

serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble; I'm talking about the real thing.

If you stick to your principles, of course things go better for you —

assuming you don't get killed in the process. That's elementary psychology.

People have a highly developed sense of reciprocity, of the appropriateness

of the treatment they receive from each other. If things work out too well

for them, they can't help asking, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ If you

don't have a good answer, you'll sabotage yourself. Not all the time, but

often enough. So if you do something that improves your self-esteem —

” “Self-esteem is for the weak,” I quipped. Will rolled his eyes. “I don't

think like that,” I protested. “No? Why did you even bring it up, then?” I

shrugged. “Maybe it just made me less pessimistic. I could have had the crap

beaten out of me, but I didn't. That makes asking someone to a concert seem a

lot less dangerous.” I was beginning to cringe at all this unwanted analysis,

and I had nothing to counter Will's pop psychology except an equally folksy

version of my own. He could see I was embarrassed, so he let the matter drop.

As I watched Francine moving through the crowd, though, I couldn't shake off

an unsettling sense of the tenuousness of the circumstances that had brought

us together. There was no denying that if I'd walked away from the alley, and

the kitchen hand had died, I would have felt like shit for a long time

afterwards. I would not have felt entitled to much out of my own life. I

hadn't walked away, though. And even if the decision had come down to the

wire, why shouldn't I be proud that I'd made the right choice? That didn't

mean everything that followed was tainted, like a reward from some sleazy,

palm-greasing deity. I hadn't won Francine's affection in a medieval test of

bravery; we'd chosen each other, and persisted with that choice, for a

thousand complicated reasons. We were together now; that was what mattered. I

wasn't going to dwell on the path that had brought me to her, just to dredge

up all the doubts and insecurities that had almost kept us apart. 2012 As we

drove the last kilometre along the road south from Ar Rafidiyah, I could see

the Wall of Foam glistening ahead of us in the morning sunlight.

Insubstantial as a pile of soap bubbles, but still intact, after six

weeks. “I can't believe it's lasted this long,” I told Sadiq. “You didn't

trust the models?” “Fuck, no. Every week, I thought we'd come over the hill

and there'd be nothing but a shrivelled-up cobweb.” Sadiq smiled. “So you had

no faith in my calculations?” “Don't take it personally. There were a lot of

things we could have both got wrong.” Sadiq pulled off the road. His

students, Hassan and Rashid, had climbed off the back of the truck and

started towards the Wall before I'd even got my face mask on. Sadiq called

them back, and made them put on plastic boots and paper suits over their

clothes, while the two of us did the same. We didn't usually bother with this

much protection, but today was different. Close up, the Wall almost vanished:

all you noticed were isolated, rainbow-fringed reflections, drifting at a

leisurely pace across the otherwise invisible film as water redistributed

itself, following waves induced in the membrane by the interplay of air

pressure, thermal gradients, and surface tension. These images might easily

have been separate objects, scraps of translucent plastic blowing around

above the desert, held aloft by a breeze too faint to detect at ground

level. The further away you looked, though, the more crowded the hints of

light became, and the less plausible any alternative hypothesis that denied

the Wall its integrity. It stretched for a kilometre along the edge of the

desert, and rose an uneven fifteen to twenty metres into the air. But it was

merely the first, and smallest, of its kind, and the time had come to put it

on the back of the truck and drive it all the way back to Basra. Sadiq took a

spray can of reagent from the cabin, and shook it as he walked down the

embankment. I followed him, my heart in my mouth. The Wall had not dried out;

it had not been torn apart or blown away, but there was still plenty of room

for failure. Sadiq reached up and sprayed what appeared from my vantage to be

thin air, but I could see the fine mist of droplets strike the membrane. A

breathy susurration rose up, like the sound from a steam iron, and I felt a

faint warm dampness before the first silken threads appeared, crisscrossing

the region where the polymer from which the Wall was built had begun to shift

conformations. In one state, the polymer was soluble, exposing hydrophilic

groups of atoms that bound water into narrow sheets of feather-light gel.

Now, triggered by the reagent and powered by sunlight, it was tucking these

groups into slick, oily cages, and expelling every molecule of water,

transforming the gel into a desiccated web. I just hoped it wasn't expelling

anything else. As the lacy net began to fall in folds at his feet, Hassan said

something in Arabic, disgusted and amused. My grasp of the language remained

patchy; Sadiq translated for me, his voice muffled by his face mask: “He says

probably most of the weight of the thing will be dead insects.” He shooed the

youths back towards the truck before following himself, as the wind blew a

glistening curtain over our heads. It descended far too slowly to trap us,

but I hastened up the slope. We watched from the truck as the Wall came down,

the wave of dehydration propagating along its length. If the gel had been an

elusive sight close up, the residue was entirely invisible in the distance;

there was less substance to it than a very long pantyhose — albeit, pantyhose

clogged with gnats. The smart polymer was the invention of Sonja Helvig, a

Norwegian chemist; I'd tweaked her original design for this application.

Sadiq and his students were civil engineers, responsible for scaling

everything up to the point where it could have a practical benefit. On those

terms, this experiment was still nothing but a minor field trial. I turned to

Sadiq. “You did some mine clearance once, didn't you?” “Years ago.” Before I

could say anything more, he'd caught my drift. “You're thinking that might

have been more satisfying? Bang, and it's gone, the proof is there in front

of you?” “One less mine, one less bomblet,” I said. “However many thousands

there were to deal with, at least you could tick each one off as a definite

achievement.” “That's true. It was a good feeling.” He shrugged. “But what

should we do? Give up on this, because it's harder?” He took the truck down

the slope, then supervised the students as they attached the wisps of polymer

Greg Egan - Singleton.pdf

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