Authors: Pat Murphy
He looked up and met her eyes. “Mary Maxwell—the name came to me so easily, almost an echo of my own name. I dreamed of her and she told me stories. It was quite lovely.”
He sipped his coffee and frowned. “I should have stopped there. That would have been best. But that fall, my agent suggested I write a crime thriller. It was a dreary autumn and the garbage men were on strike. All Manhattan stank like a Dumpster. I was in a bleak mood and I thought of Weldon Merrimax. Another echo of my name; a joke, really. I told my agent and he laughed. That night, I dreamed of Weldon Merrimax, an angry man obsessed with money and power. We talked, and he told me about crimes he had committed, about cons and swindles and frauds. He seemed to like talking to me. I listened and I wrote the first Weldon Merrimax book.”
Max looked out the window at the gray ocean waves. “There’s a question writers joke about. People always ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ As if we had a clue. Oh, I can tell you bits and pieces of the process—someone mentioned this which led me to think about that and so I put these things together with a story from the
New York Times
and ended up over here. But where did Mary and Weldon come from? I don’t know. I made up the names and invented the characters—or did I? Maybe they were already out there, waiting to be found. Maybe I called them up by invoking their names.” Max shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“But what’s going on now?” Susan asked.
“Well, I’m working on a new book,” he said. “Writing a novel always involves a bit of turbulence.”
Susan stared at him. “A bit of turbulence?” she repeated.
Max shrugged. “It’s part of the creative process,” he said. “The subconscious isn’t a tidy place. I’ve been sleeping badly and I haven’t been dreaming.” He shrugged. “But I’m sure it will all work out.”
“Weldon Merrimax said he wanted to talk to you,” Susan said. “He said he was rearranging things so that they’d be more to his liking. He talked about God and Lucifer and said it’s a question of who is going to be the Creator. He said to tell you he wants to talk to you.”
“And so you have.” Max did not seem perturbed. “That was the right thing to do.”
“But what are you going to do?” Susan asked. “I think you need to talk to Weldon.”
“Do I? I have nothing to say to him.” Max shook his head. “If Weldon wants to sneak around leaving cryptic notes, that’s his business. I’ll just ignore him.”
Max reached out and tapped a finger on the note in her hand. “The lower trigram is K’un, representing receptivity and the earth. The upper trigram is the mountain, which keeps very still. The superior man will wait quietly, avoiding action.” Max folded his hands in front of him, smiling. “I believe that’s the course the
I Ching
recommends.”
“But he’s very angry,” Susan said.
Max did not reply. He glanced at his watch. “You know, we’d better hurry or we’ll be late to class.” He smiled at her. “Just relax. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Somehow Susan didn’t believe him.
Susan returned to her stateroom before workshop, figuring she would wake up Pat. But when she got there, Pat was already in the shower. The dressing table was covered with sheets of notebook paper and the notebook paper was covered with equations.
As Susan closed the stateroom door, the sound of running water stopped. A moment later, Pat stepped from the bathroom. She was wearing one of the white terry cloth robes and toweling off her hair. “What have you been up to?” Susan asked her, waving a hand at the drift of notebook pages.
“I ran into Ian last night, after the show. We got to talking about the weird stuff that’s been going on. I came up with a theory to explain it, and I’ve been working out the math.”
“The math?” Susan said, baffled.
“It’s Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation with a few extra spins suggested by Roger Penrose’s work. The influence of the conscious mind on the quantum state, that is. I can show you the math, if you like.”
“That’s okay,” Susan said quickly. “Maybe you could just give me the overview.”
“I figured I’d tell Max about it after workshop,” Pat said. “Maybe we could all have lunch. I bet Ian would be up for it.”
Though they hurried, they arrived at workshop late. Max was already lecturing.
“An important aspect of a story that beginning writers often forget is point of view. Who is telling the story? Whose eyes are you seeing the world through, whose perceptions are filtering the information you provide? You can tell the same story from two different points of view and get two very different stories.”
He talked for a while about possible points of view. Susan didn’t take very good notes. She was distracted. Every time a jogger ran past the window, she glanced in that direction, thinking it might be Weldon Merrimax.
“Now let’s try an exercise,” Max said. “Earlier on, you wrote about monsters. I asked you to write a scene where your monster was just out of sight. Today, we are going to try something a little different. I mentioned that writers have to get to know their monsters. One way to learn about something is to observe it from the outside. But as a writer, that’s not enough. You need to know your characters inside and out.
“So here’s what I want you to do. Imagine yourself standing by a closed door. It can be any kind of door you like: a spaceship airlock, a garden gate, the front door of your own home. You hear something at the door and you know that there’s a monster on the other side. The monster wants to come in.”
“I want you to write a scene from the point of view of that monster. You have to be the monster. Think about what the monster wants, what the monster needs.” Max was silent, giving them all a chance to think. “Now I want you to write a scene from the monster’s point of view.”
Max waited while everyone got out notebooks and pens. As usual, Alberta had a question: “Does it have to be the same monster I wrote about before?”
“That’s up to you. It could be a little different. You’re getting to know your monster, and the version of it that you see today may be a little different from the version you knew a few days back.”
Susan stared at the page. She didn’t have to work too hard to imagine standing by a door with the monster on one side. She remembered the night before. But which monster should she choose to be: the monster in the dark or the monster who was Weldon Merrimax?
She thought about the dark corridor. She imagined herself as a monster, crouching in the darkness, watching a woman try to open a door. The door wouldn’t open. The monster could smell the woman’s sweat, the scent of fear. The woman was staring wide-eyed into the darkness, waving a silly little flashlight around. The woman was rattling the doorknob, calling out for help. Then the door opened and the woman was gone, rushing out of the darkness, slamming the door closed.
The monster was alone in the darkness.
“Think about how the monster feels,” Max said. “What does the monster smell? What does the monster hear?”
How did the monster feel? “The monster felt strong,” she wrote. “The monster could still smell the woman’s fear. The monster breathed deeply, enjoying that scent. Such a foolish, weak woman, the monster thought.
“The monster could hear voices from the other side of the door. The woman’s voice, high-pitched and trembling. Another voice, a man’s voice.
“The monster went to the door and leaned against it. He did not push on the door—he didn’t want to open it. He didn’t want to go into the light, where she could see him. He liked it in the shadows and the darkness.
“He could hear her frightened voice—what a lovely sound. It would take so little to make her scream. She would cry out and ask for mercy. That would be good.
“Women were weak, the monster thought. He loved that about them. Such lovely playthings—they broke so easily.
“He smiled in the darkness, leaning against the cold metal door. The voices were moving away. The monster could hear the sound of footsteps on metal stairs, fading in the distance. The woman was gone.
“That didn’t matter, the monster thought. He was patient. There would be other chances. No need to hurry.”
At the end of class, Ian showed up at the back of the library. Pat waved to him, grabbed Susan’s arm, and hailed Max before he could leave. “I thought maybe you would join us for lunch,” she said. “I was hoping to talk to you about quantum mechanics and a few ideas I had.”
Max looked a little startled, but nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I’d be delighted.”
They went to Penelope’s for lunch and found a table by the window. Outside, the sky was still overcast. The ocean was a restless surging gray.
As soon as they ordered, Pat pulled out her sheets of equations, set them on the table, and launched into an explanation of her theory. “You know, of course, about Schrodinger’s cat,” she said.
Max nodded. “Yes, of course. Any science fiction writer worth his salt knows about Schrodinger’s cat.”
Pat glanced at Susan, and she nodded. Pat had explained the theoretical beast to her long ago.
“Now there are many explanations of what happens when you open the box, look at the cat, and find out it’s either alive or dead,” Pat continued. “You’ve got two potentialities—two different realities, if you will, superposed on each other. Then you take a look and you’ve only got one. Or do you?” Pat paused dramatically, glancing at Susan, then Ian, then Max. No one spoke.
“Not necessarily,” Pat said at last. “Some have proposed that both realities continue to exist. In one, you are looking at a dead cat; in another, you are looking at a live cat. Two versions of you; two versions of the cat; two different realities. Each reality splits again and again, creating many parallel lines, each following its own course, branching repeatedly.”
Max nodded. “Science fiction has done a great deal with parallel realities.”
“Not just science fiction, Max,” Pat said. “Physics, too. Everett and De Witt worked out the math.” She tapped a finger on a series of equations on the topmost sheet. “But I’ve always had a problem with their theory. They postulate parallel realities, but no mechanism by which these realities are connected. If there are parallel realities, I think there must be a means of interconnecting them.
“That brings us to the work of Eugene Wigner,” Pat said, “In an attempt to settle on what exactly caused potentialities to resolve into realities, Wigner proposed what is now known as the Wigner Interpretation. He suggested that the agent of this action was the mind of the observer. The conscious human mind influenced potentialities and brought about the collapse of the wave function, resolving all the possibilities into one reality.”
“Now suppose for a moment that the parallel realities of Everett’s theory could be connected by the action of the conscious mind, as suggested by the Wigner Interpretation. Consciousness provides the link between the parallel realities. The question I’m wrestling with now is—how does this link occur?”
“Through dreams.” Susan spoke without thinking. Everyone looked at her. She bit her lip and ducked her head. “Just a thought,” she muttered.
“Sure,” Ian said. “In dreams, people from one reality visit other branches.”
Pat blinked, startled at this contribution. “That’s a possibility,” she said slowly. “I don’t know how to represent that mathematically, but it’s an interesting idea.”
“Ordinarily the connection is through dreams,” Ian went on. “But maybe, when conditions are right, people from other realities can actually cross over into this one. Like maybe in the Bermuda Triangle.” Ian grinned at Pat. “Do you think that’s possible?”
Pat frowned. “I don’t know.” She tapped on one of her equations. “I mean—take a look here. There’s a significant energy barrier between the parallel realities.”
Ian kept his gaze fixed on Pat. He liked the ideas more than the math, Susan thought. “I don’t know much about this,” he said, “but what about the possibilities of quantum tunneling.” He glanced at Susan and Max. “Quantum particles that should be confined to one area by an energy barrier sometimes show up elsewhere, as if they tunneled through the barrier rather than jumping over,” he explained. “That’s quite a stretch,” Pat said, frowning at her equations.
“Equating a person with a quantum particle.”
“A virtual person,” Ian said. “Like a virtual particle.” Again he glanced at Susan and Max. “Virtual particles are always popping in and out of the quantum vacuum,” he told them.
“What’s the quantum vacuum?” Susan asked, struggling to keep some kind of a grip on the conversation.
“It’s the sea of potentiality that underlies everything in the universe,” Pat said. “And Ian’s right—virtual particles are always popping out of it, then disappearing again.”
Max chuckled. “There’s a lovely idea for a novel somewhere in there,” he said cheerfully. “I’d say science fiction is ready to incorporate a little more quantum mechanics.”
“Oh, it’s not science fiction,” Pat said. “The pressure exerted by virtual particles was measured experimentally back in 1996 by a fellow at Los Alamos. They’re really out there.”
“So a virtual particle pops into existence and then disappears again,” Max said.
“Usually,” Pat said. “But sometimes a virtual particle can stay on this side of reality. That happens if it collides with a real particle and steals its energy. Then the particle that was robbed disappears and the virtual one becomes real.”
Susan gave up on trying to make sense of the equations and glanced at Max. She was startled to see that the writer looked concerned. But Pat had returned to her equations. “I suppose quantum tunneling is a possibility,” she said. “Look here.”
Ian leaned over to consider the equation.
Susan arrived in the library just a few minutes after the kids got there. She had rushed off, leaving Max with Pat and Ian, considering Pat’s incomprehensible equations.
With Cindy’s help, Susan got the kids settled relatively quickly.
They were ready to hear more of Bailey’s adventures.
She read the next couple of chapters, in which Bailey and his friends were captured by Resurrectionists, a group of space pirates who harvested human brains and nervous systems and used them in the construction of cyborg systems. Bailey’s friends escaped, but Bailey was left behind to face a monster in the hold of the Resurrectionist ship.