Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 14

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WALDEMAR HAD EXPECTED time to move more quickly once he’d put Znojmo behind him, but to his surprise the opposite was true. Each instant was now distinct from those before and after, bite-sized and luminous, like a pearl on an invisible, indivisible wire. Vienna rattled and bustled and pirouetted around him, but he felt himself to be in no great hurry—though it wasn’t until the end of his first year at the university, reading the work of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, that he understood why. Lorentz had discovered, to his and the whole world’s astonishment, that time moves more slowly for a body in motion. And it often seemed to Waldemar, since he’d escaped the constraints of his childhood, that his body had never fully come to rest.

Unlike his brother, no event steered my great-uncle’s attention back to the Accidents, for the simple reason that they’d never left his thoughts. His father’s cryptic discovery and sudden death had conspired to give Waldemar a sense of significance he’d never otherwise have had, and he took pains to be deserving of his fate. Occasionally the thought would make him shiver, like a pang of self-consciousness in a crowded theater: Without the Accidents, I’d be no different than any other man. The notion thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. By “Accidents,” he meant two distinct but intertwined events: both Ottokar’s discovery and the encounter with Progress, in the form of Herr Bachling’s Daimler, that had snuffed his father’s brilliance just as it was poised to set the world alight.

Waldemar saw his coming of age—his entire existence, in fact—as a series of momentous collisions; but those two were set apart from the rest, kept sacrosanct and pure. Not even Kaspar grasped how much they signified. Waldemar had made a close study of his brother after their father’s death, but Kaspar seemed to be the same person afterward that he’d been before. He was haunted by the Accidents, of course—how could he not have been?—but he showed no gratitude for their occurrence. When this realization set in, Waldemar’s disappointment was bitter; and though he kept his outward manner cordial, he was careful to keep his ideas to himself.

He was sorry to do so, desperately sorry, because his thoughts grew more electric by the day. He could feel the secret of the Accidents flutter against his brain stem as he went about his work—especially when he was busy with something trivial, such as drafting a letter for the widow Bemmelmans—and on certain evenings, as he nodded off at his desk at the university, it beat against his awareness like a moth against a paper window-shade. Waldemar copied Ottokar’s riddle into a series of notebooks, just as Kaspar had done, taking pains to match his father’s scrawl exactly. He chanted it under his breath on streetcars and benches and barstools, like a madman or an Israelite at prayer, and it never failed to pacify his nerves.

The Michelson-Morley experiment weighed on Waldemar’s mind. How in God’s name could the speed of light be absolute—a constant? Only time and space could have that magic property. Isaac Newton, the greatest intellect in human history, had unlocked the mechanics of the entire solar system based on this self-evident fact, and had solved the mysteries of gravitation; in light of the Michelson-Morley result, however, Newton’s laws had come to seem outmoded, even quaint. How was this possible? Waldemar longed to ask Kaspar—to ask his opinion, to have an ally again, to break free of the glass dome that seemed to have been lowered over him since coming to Vienna—but the truth was that he feared his brother’s answer. How could it be that nothing—no force in the universe, not even the spinning of a planet on its axis—either added to light’s velocity or reduced it?

Each time he arrived at this precipice, Waldemar compelled himself to catch his conceptual breath. He could feel his neurons pickling whenever he dwelt on its implications, as though the fat his cerebrum floated in were gradually being transmuted into brine. This nauseated him at first—it made his entire body clench—but in time he taught himself to like the feeling. And once he’d begun to relish the sensation, once it had stopped sickening him, something shifted inside his skull, like a delirious child turning in a sweat-sodden bed, and his father’s text began to offer up its secrets.

What frustrated Waldemar most about Ottokar’s note was that it hovered so coyly between sense and nonsense, refusing to hold still from one line to the next. Sentences of gobbledygook were folded over and under familiar citations—like strata of dough in a strudel—and others that were clearly drawn from classical sources, whose origins might potentially be traced. And then there were the references (surely not arbitrary?) to mistresses and married life and sex. After dozens of failed attempts to crack the code, Waldemar decided to invert his strategy: he would begin on solid ground, by considering the citations, then work his way slowly out into the jabber.

Time can be measured only in its passing had been a favored axiom of Ottokar’s, often cited after long and fruitless mornings in the laboratory. Waldemar had heard it so often, in fact, that he’d never bothered to inquire where it came from, and it was only at the close of a long and increasingly despondent week at the Imperial Library that he found it at last, in the fourteenth chapter of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

“What then, is time?” asks the saint. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists—and the present is merely an instant. “The present of things past is memory,” he writes; “the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation.” Augustine’s conclusion—never fully stated, but unmistakably implied—is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else.

This notion stupefied Waldemar nearly as much as the Michelson-Morley result. Augustine’s theory was an even blunter refutation of Newton’s law of absolutes, and he’d conceived it in a North African backwater, surrounded by desert, a millennium before Sir Isaac had drawn his first breath! Scrambling to recover his equilibrium, Waldemar reminded himself that Augustine had been a cleric, not a scientist; but the fact remained that Ottokar had cited him. The thought of it made Waldemar physically ill. Newton’s laws—with their elegance, their reasonableness, and, above all, their immaculate order—were the reason he’d consecrated himself to physics; without them, he might as well have stayed a pickler. He was not a young man who took pleasure in ambiguity. Ambiguity was dangerously close, in his estimation, to hypocrisy; and hypocrisy—as every true revolutionary knows—is the music by which complacency and decadence dance their unholy quadrille.

The next citation was more unsettling still: As the soul grows toward eternal life, it remembers less and less. This seemed more like something his mother might mutter into her handkerchief at church than anything relevant to Ottokar’s work. In which tightly shuttered compartment of his father’s brain had this mystical strain been concealed? For the briefest of instants, Waldemar found himself questioning Ottokar’s competence, even—fleetingly, half-consciously—his sanity; it took his last reserves of love and strength to force that portal closed. The very next night, however, when he identified Plotinus, of all people, as the author of the passage, his confusion returned with a force that swamped him utterly. Plotinus was the worst of the old pagan neoplatonists: a fuzzy-headed metaphysician who’d inspired countless early Christian flower-sniffers, not to mention soothsayers and Gnostics and God knew who else. Important as he might have been for the Church, he had no place in a scientific treatise.

Ironically enough, it turned out to be the Church—or one church, in particular—that set Waldemar on the proper path at last. Disenchanted with his father’s taste in philosophy, he narrowed his focus still further, restricting it to the parts of Ottokar’s text that seemed to refer to actual events of his duration. This proved most difficult of all, to his dismay, because the slightest reference to the sausage-chewing sow his father had fornicated with each weekday made piss-colored spots dance before Waldemar’s eyes and the carpet twitch and heave beneath his feet. In the end he was reduced to pondering a single sentence of the letter, which he read and reread, recombined and dissected and recited to himself until it acquired the power of prophecy. It was the plainest of sentences, no more than a phrase: the pulpit for preachers in Pamět’ Cathedral. It was pure chance, he would later write—certainly not fate, let alone Providence—that this turned out to be the only phrase he needed.

Ottokar had been clever—cunning, even—to hide the key in plain sight, in a thicket of high-minded nonsense. It stood out exceedingly subtly, betraying itself only if one knew where to look. Unlike his brother, Waldemar recalled that pulpit very well, not only because of its peculiar globelike shape, but also because of their father’s fascination with it. Like the uncle of Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, who’d once torn out a lock of his nephew’s hair so that the boy might never forget having seen the royal carriage pass, Ottokar had given Waldemar’s ear a sharp twist on that December morning, then directed his gaze upward toward the gilt-and-silver pulpit without a word of explanation.

The significance of that structure—for it was clearly the pulpit itself that interested his father, not the lisping, milk-faced clergyman it buttressed—became the defining enigma of Waldemar’s youth. If he’d kept the memory stowed away until that moment, if he’d hesitated to tell even his brother, it was only because of the tremendous charge it carried. But now his father himself, two years after his death, had eased the mystery back into the light. And what affected Waldemar most keenly—what made his eyes water and his fingers go numb with excitement—was that his father had done so with such stealth that he alone, of all people living, could recognize it for the hidden sign it was.

The pulpit was no more than five feet in diameter and (aside from a narrow, flattened opening through which the priest protruded) was perfectly round. It had been meant to symbolize the triumph of Catholic doctrine in all the seven corners of the world, evidently, because its silver-plated surface was marked by lines of longitude and latitude, and all the continents of the earth—Antarctica included!—were proudly represented in gold leaf. But Waldemar had spent nearly three years assisting his father, and he knew that geography had held even less interest for him than the niceties of internal combustion. It must therefore have been the shape of the pulpit that had mattered to Ottokar: its shape, and the relation of that shape to the pulpit’s purpose as a staging area for the Holy Word. A globe had been chosen to symbolize Rome’s omnipresence simply because the earth, at the time, was as much of the universe as mankind understood.

It was then that Waldemar had a remarkable thought, one that set him, quietly but inescapably, on a course for infamy. If the shape of the pulpit was the feature that had inpired his father, and if the pulpit had been built to house the truth, and if that truth—the divine truth, the Holy Word of God—had been meant both to explain and to contain the universe, then Ottokar’s message wasn’t so obscure at all. He was saying, in effect, that the sphere was not only the fundamental shape in the solar system—not only the shape taken by the planets, and by the moons of those planets, and by the sun at its center—but that the sphere was the shape of the universe itself. We were all contained within it—all matter, all energy, all experience, all time—like the priest in his pulpit in Pamët’ Cathedral.

But then, in the course of a month’s feverish work, my great-uncle strayed even farther. If the speed of light was unchanging, as Michelson and Morley insisted, then time and space would clearly have to bend; but a spherical universe alone wasn’t enough to account for the interferometer’s readings. The distortions in space and time would have to be local—measurable in a few cubic feet in the basement of a Midwestern university—and the act of measurement itself would have to summon those distortions into being.

This last notion, in particular, led Waldemar to suspect that he had forfeited his place among the sane. He was speculating wildly now, almost hysterically: this new work felt less like science to him than like philosophy, or poetry, or some strain of wordless, polyrhythmic song. He was drifting into twilight, Mrs. Haven, but the glories that awaited him there were beautiful—so beautiful that he regretted nothing. There was power in severing the umbilical cord of precedent: the power of complete supremacy. Finally, after more than a year of hurling himself against the walls of consensus reality, he could feel those walls starting to give.

In the ensuing weeks, emboldened by his progress, Waldemar scuttled his last remaining scraps of orthodoxy. He found himself utterly alone, in a singularity of his own making, falling away from everyone he’d ever known or cared for. There was no turning back any longer, no bread-crumb trail, no lifeline to the past. He was wholly at the mercy of the future.

If the cosmos as a whole is subject to mysterious forces that warp it into the shape of a globe, Waldemar reasoned, shouldn’t those forces have the same effect on smaller amounts of matter, given the right set of conditions? The fact that the world as we experience it doesn’t seem filled with countless bubbles of spacetime—essentially tiny, autonomous universes, as he was coming to believe—is no argument against the possibility. We don’t see the world around us as constructed of microscopic particles, after all, yet no one has contested the atomic model in a century.

The idea of the observer having an impact on observed phenomena would eventually find expression in Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, of course—but this was two decades earlier, Mrs. Haven, and Waldemar went Heisenberg one better. What was the act of inquiry into the nature of time, he asked himself, but an expression of human consciousness: in fact, the highest form of that expression? What else could be the catalyst, therefore—the source of the impulse that made spacetime buckle—but the concerted action of the human brain?

At last, after weeks of exquisite agony, he appreciated Augustine’s genius. More than that: he saw its implications burst into flower around him in explosions of pure mental color. It was the defining moment of his life, and Waldemar knew it, though he had no idea as yet where it would lead him. The foundational postulate had been established: the great and reckless leap from the salons of bourgeois reason into the primeval fissure from which true genius oozes. It burned his former self away, it stripped him of his ego without mercy, but he was eager for the sacrifice. He’d have traded the world for this one crumb of insight: that time and space themselves are in transit, subject to a motion both pliable and absolute, and that man can influence said motion by an act of focused, virtuosic will.

It was this last hypothesis, Mrs. Haven, that held the seed of Waldemar’s damnation.

The mathematics didn’t fit, not yet, but that would come. He had his entire duration to make the mathematics fit. He desired no fame for himself, no glory, no material compensation; the envy of his rivals would suffice. That and the fact that he, Waldemar Toula, second son of Ottokar Gottfriedens, had redeemed his father’s Lebenswerk from oblivion.

∞

At virtually the same time, working after hours in his office in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was writing a paper. Calm where my great-uncle was euphoric, complacent where he was shrill, taking measured steps through a landscape Waldemar glided over on wings made out of candle wax and spit, the rumple-headed Jew with the “dark, soulful eyes” was putting the finishing touches to his Viennese colleague’s destruction. He was about to provide the answer to the apparent paradox posed by Michelson and Morley, and his answer, once proven, would extinguish all others. Science brooks no dissent, Mrs. Haven; not over the course of time. Soon the case would be closed. Waldemar’s work—and, by extension, his father’s—would vanish into the vacuum of obsolete ideas.

The “Patent Clerk,” as he came to be referred to in my family, had never heard of my great-uncle, any more than Waldemar had ever heard of him; but like Newton and Leibniz, like Darwin and Wallace, these two young German-speaking eccentrics were closing in on the same territory at virtually the identical moment. The fact that Waldemar overshot the mark disastrously, arcing like a comet over the (relatively) stable ground on which Einstein stood, did nothing to lessen the sting of his rival’s conquest of the scientific mainstream. 1905 would go down in history as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the year in which, at the age of not quite twenty-seven, without so much as a university degree, he hit on the preposterously, childishly, almost insultingly simple formula E = mc², which describes the universal relationship between energy and matter.

It would prove to be a magical year for my great-uncle as well, but the magic in his case was black as pitch. His father had met his end in the form of a watch salesman’s Daimler, a death that was not without a certain gentle irony; Waldemar’s nemesis, by contrast, was neither a man nor a machine, but an idea. That idea’s name was special relativity, Mrs. Haven, and there was nothing gentle about it whatsoever. As obscure as it was—and as innocuous as its author appeared—it had the power to annihilate the world.