Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [10]
She frowned. “Don’t be silly.” She had her own hot buttons. Tom did not know what they were, but he managed to hit them all the same.
“Silly, hell!” He slammed his hand down sharply on the terminal and she jumped a little. Then he turned his back and faced the screen once more. Silence fell, continuing the quarrel.
Now, Sharon had that peculiar ability to stand outside herself, which is a valuable skill, so long as one comes back inside now and then. They were both being silly. She was angry at having her train of thought derailed, and Tom was angry because some simulation of his wouldn’t work out. She glanced at her own work and thought, I’m not helping me by not helping him, which might be a poor reason for charity, but it beats having none at all.
“I’m sorry.”
They spoke in counterpoint. She looked up, and he turned ‘round, and they stared at each other for a moment and ratified a tacit armistice. The geodesic to peace and quiet was to hear him out; so Sharon crossed the room and perched on the corner of his desk.
“All right,” she said. “Explain. What’s this Zip-whatever theory?”
In answer, he turned to his keyboard, entered commands with the flourish of a pianist, and rolled his chair aside for her. “Tell me what you see.”
Sharon sighed a little and stood behind him with her arms folded and her head cocked. The screen displayed a grid of hexagons, each containing a single dot. Some dots were brighter than others. “A honeycomb,” she told him. “A honeycomb with fireflies.”
Tom grunted. “And they say physicists make lousy poets. Notice anything?”
She read the names beside the dots. Omaha. Des Moines. Ottumwa … “The brighter the dot, the bigger the city. Right?”
“Vice versa, actually; but, right. What else?”
Why couldn’t he just tell her? He had to make it a guessing game. His students, waiting beak-open for his lectures, often felt the same disquiet. Sharon concentrated on the screen, seeking the obvious. She did not regard cliology as an especially deep science, or much of a science at all. “Okay. The big cities form a partial ring. Around Chicago.”
Tom grinned. “Ganz bestimmt, Schatz. There should be six of them, but Lake Michigan gets in the way, so the ring’s incomplete. Now, what surrounds each of the big cities?”
“A ring of not-so-big cities. How fractal! But the pattern isn’t perfect …”
“Life’s not perfect,” he answered. “Microgeography and boundary conditions distort the pattern, but I correct for that by transforming the coordinates to an equivalent, infinite plain.”
“A manifold. Cute,” she said. “What’s your transformation?”
“Effective distance is a function of the time and energy needed to travel between two points. Non-Abelian, which complicates matters.”
“Non-Abelian? But then—.”
“B can be farther from A than A is from B. Sure, why not? The Portuguese found it easier to sail down the coast of Africa than to sail back up. Or, take our own dry cleaners? The streets are one-way, so it takes three times longer to drive there than it does to drive back.”
But Sharon wasn’t listening any longer. Non-Abelian! Of course, of course! How could I have been so stupid? Oh, the happy, unquestioning life of an Abelian, Euclidean, Hausdorff peasant! Could Janatpour space be non-isotropic? Could distance in one direction differ from distance in another? It’s always faster coming home. But how? How?
His voice shattered her reverie once more. “… oxcarts or automobiles. So, the map is always in transition from one equilibrium to another. Now watch.”
If she didn’t hold his hand while he complained, she would never get her own work done. “Watch what?” she asked, perhaps in a harsher voice than she had intended, because he cast her a wounded glance before bending again over the keyboard. While he did, she slipped across the room and retrieved her notebook so she could capture her butterfly