Chapter 28: Waiting
Two months passed.
Celestia and Luna took up volunteer work caring for the numerous children of the hospital. Luna continued to develop her skill at counseling, while Celestia discovered a talent for teaching.
Finally, Meridiem woke up.
“Mother…?”
“Merry! Merry, you’ve come back! Praise the Goddess!”
When the doctor came to check on her, Meridiem’s first question was about the states of Gnosi and Pr. Guiseman. She was told that Gnosi was due to wake up himself any day now. As for Gus Guiseman, his condition had only worsened since he was brought in.
Another week passed. Meridiem was able to walk short distances without getting winded, while Gnosi, now awake, was still confined to a wheelchair for now. Archbishop Shepherd arranged for a meeting in an out-of-the-way waiting room with Father Delver. There the young man was filled in on what had happened in 1945 Trinity. And of something that was different in the 1985 they returned to.
“…So you’re telling me he’s dead? My Uncle Pitch?” Gnosi was flabbergasted. “He called me a week before the flight.”
“Not in this reality,” Delver grimly explained. “Pitchblende Smith died twenty-three years ago. He was pretty high up in the plutonium production hierarchy at Hanford. So high that the details of his death are all tied up in red tape.”
“Even with the perks granted me under the Far Shooter administration, I haven’t been able to find anything,” Shepherd added. “He was known as an arch-patriot…based on what you’ve told me, it’s possible that he snapped when he discovered the Cold War he was fighting was a lie.”
Gnosi shook his head as he took it all in.
“And that’s not all,” said Meridiem. “You…proposed to me, the night before the flight.”
“Only I didn’t,” Gnosi protested. “Neither of us remembers having done that.”
“And that’s because it wasn’t us,” said Meridiem. “It was the versions of us that grew up in this changed world.”
“I guess…with Uncle Pitch’s death hanging over me, I would have wanted to push forward our relationship instead of wait until I got a position in the ministry,” said Gnosi. “We can call it off if you’d like.”
“I…I don’t mind getting married early,” Meridiem said shyly. “Not after what we’ve been through. Father Delver said that he was going to cover half the costs, as a way of thanking us for what we’ve done with our research.”
“Considering you saved the world, I’d be happy to pick up the whole bill,” said the Archbishop. “It’s just a pity we can’t do something for Professor Guiseman.”
“Have you considered using a solarium?” asked Gnosi with some heat. “We’ve more than proven that it unlocks all kinds of powers in Markists.”
Archbishop Shepherd smiled. “Meridiem’s already informed me that the Archbishop you remember was rather bull-headed when it came to science. I had a change of heart after the President confided in me about the ‘miracle’ of diminishing atomic yields right after his inauguration. Sorry I couldn’t tell you about that before now, Delver.”
“As a matter of national security, I understand.”
“Now I won’t say that I’m still not cautious about who should be told about your team’s discoveries, but I’m not blind to possibilities. There’s been a solarium in this very hospital for the past four years, and it’s in near-constant use by our doctors with healing powers, on believer and non-believer patient alike.”
“Really?” asked Gnosi.
“I’ll arrange a tour. Of course, the patients are all heavily sedated during the procedures, so they don’t see anything that might get us in trouble with non-Markists.”
“You have changed then.”
“Yes, I’ve found all kinds of changes between the history we remembered and this new one,” said Meridiem. “Some came from what we did, but most of them seem to be random events that went the other way with a re-rolling of the cosmic dice. I’m sure the Professor would be delighted to study the differences.” She sighed as she thought of Gus’ current state. “I wish I could have met our prior selves. In a way, we killed them when we snapped back to 1985—they had subtly-different hopes and dreams than us, and now they no longer exist.”
“Frankly, I expected that I’d gain a new set of memories when I woke up,” Gnosi admitted.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Meridiem vowed. “I’m never travelling through time again.”
Celestia and Luna looked in on the hospital room where the Professor was being kept, an array of equipment attached to him both to monitor his condition and to maintain it as best was possible with late Twentieth Century science.
Over the past few days the greatest minds in physics had come through that little room to pay their respects. Currently sitting at the back of the room was Gabriel Gell-Mann, Gus’ co-worker in theoretical particle physics at Caltech. He looked like the stereotypical idea of a kindly Jewish grandfather, marred by a perpetual scowl. He had a round face, round-rimmed glasses, and white hair in tiny round curls. His bushy eyebrows retained their original brownish hue. When he deigned to speak to his inferiors, he did it with a thick Eastern European accent, even as his words were better English than the speech of many native-born Americans. And he was dressed in a tweed suit that was probably last in fashion a decade before he was even born. The shape of his nose and the sharp glint hiding in his eyes made the two sisters think more than anything of a bird of prey.
It was Goanna Guiseman’s turn to speak. “My earliest memory was of standing in my crib and tugging on Gus’ hair,” she began. She was leaning against one wall, her hands in her pockets. Her two sons were sitting next to her, and her stepdaughter was standing next to Gell-Mann, looking down at him with an indulgent smile. “I was about two years old and he was teaching me how to count. If I got the number right, he let me tug on his hair and put on a silly face to make me laugh. He was nine years older than me, and even then he’d spend his spare time walking through town with a screwdriver in his back-pocket, offering to fix people’s busted radios.
“When I was five, Giddy hired me to work in his electronics lab, for two cents a week. That was my nickname for him—Giddy—because he was just so happy when fiddling with things and wondering about the universe. My job was to throw the switches that he couldn’t reach. Sometimes I’d stick my finger in a spark gap for fun. When we were lying in bed waiting to go to sleep he’d tell me things. Like the fact that our dog, the waffle iron, and even I myself were made of wiggling little atoms. I’d ask him to get me a glass of water, and he’d tie a piece of string around the rim and whip it around in a circle to demonstrate centrifugal force. Thanks to him, I knew the names of all of the planets in order before I entered kindergarten. When we were waiting at the doctor’s office, he’d trace the corner of a picture frame and recite the Pythagorean Theorem. He said it like it was the most beautiful poem, and soon I could recite it right along with him. Imagine my surprise when I found out what it actually was!”
She closed her eyes as the next memory washed over her. “One night, he pulled me out of bed and dragged me a couple blocks to a nearby golf course, to see the night sky on fire. He told me that nobody knew what that was, or where it came from. And I fell in love with it. I was eight years old, and I knew right then that I would be the scientist who would explain the Northern Lights.”
She opened her eyes then, pausing to skip over the decades when it seemed her brother was the only person in a sexist world who supported her dreams of becoming a scientist. “A couple years after I got my PhD, I was working at the Lamont Observatory at Columbia University when the data from the first spacecraft to fly through Earth’s magnetosphere was delivered to us. I was on the verge of my goal, of understanding how auroras worked. I wanted to call up Gus at Caltech and share my excitement, but I knew, I just knew, that if I told him anything he’d figure the whole thing out first, because well, by then he was the Great Gus Guiseman. So instead I struck a deal with him. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe.’ And he said ‘OK!’”
The assembled group of listeners laughed, with a couple of murmurs of “That’s just like Gus.” Goanna’s stepdaughter Kim spoke up then, saying, “Why don’t you tell the bird story?”
Gell-Mann’s scowl deepened, just as Kim knew it would.
“Alright,” said Goanna. “Our family, like many Jewish families on Long Island, spent our summers in resorts in the Catskill Mountains. And on weekends our father would take Gus on long nature walks where they tried to understand the things they saw in the woods—I was too young at the time to go with them.
“One day one of the other kids pointed at a particular bird and asked him what it was called. And Gus replied that he had no idea. So the other kids teased him, saying his father had never taught him what a brown-throated thrush was.
“It turned out that they had talked about that very bird. ‘See that bird?’ my father had said to Gus. ‘It’s a Spencer’s warbler. Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of the bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.’ And that was the lesson that Gus learned from his father—how to see the world in a scientific way, to see beyond labels to true principles.”
Gell-Mann sighed deeply and theatrically.
Goanna Guiseman smiled. “Do you have something to add, Gabe?”
The professor rose to his feet, hooking a thumb into the inner pocket of his lapel, a stance known to his students as his ‘lecturing pose’. “Not to overly disrespect the sickly,” he said, “but that story, which I have heard Professor Guiseman tell ad nauseam, is exactly what kept him from accomplishing more with his potential than he has.
“First of all, the bird in question was obviously a white-breasted nuthatch, scientific name Sitta carolinensis. The foreign translations you gave were all nonsense—that bird is a saltapalo blanco in Spanish, a sittelle à poitrine blanche in French, a Carolinakleiber in German, a bái xiōng jīwěijiǔ in Chinese, and so on.
“So yes, any one of those names is ‘just’ a label, but without a label, where can we hang all the facts we find out about something? The name is the basis of communication. Without it, we are all lost in the wilderness of our own minds, unable to combine our insights into a greater whole. Gus chasing after ten new ways to calculate something that we’ve already figured out how to calculate is him faithfully following this broken lesson, again and again and again. It’s only because he was such a genius that he was able occasionally to emerge from this thicket to actually contribute something useful to the field of Physics.” It was obvious from the way he pronounced the word that Pr. Gell-Mann always said “Physics” with a capital “P”.
“And this curiosity about absolutely everything—is it such a crime to be a specialist in this day and age? This is not the Fifteenth Century, after all, and every one of you here in this room with a degree will agree with me that there simply aren’t enough hours in a day to devote to more than our chosen fields. Gus Guiseman is a beloved figure—thanks to that ridiculous book of his, and a hero to any number of iconoclastic young men and women, but he could have been a giant, a second Einstein, if he could have just applied himself. He could have changed the world.”
He sighed once again as he returned to his seat. “But I’m just a grumpy old man. Go back to your happy stories.”
& & &
As the stories were being told, a manuscript was being passed from one member of Gus’ family to another. The few who had read it already quickly passed it along with a sad look. Many of those who read it for the first time broke out into silent tears before they finished. Celestia and Luna noted and wondered what the document might contain.
After a quiet consultation with Gloria and Gavin, Gwen walked over and held the document out for them to take. “After everything you’ve done for my husband and…considering his condition, I think you deserve to read this. It’s…a side of Gus that he didn’t like others to know about.” She turned and re-joined her children.
Celestia and Luna leaned in to examine the yellowed document. A Post-It note in the corner read “This was written sixteen months after the death of Arline Guiseman. It was sealed in an envelope and never mentioned to another soul. It was discovered by accident in April of 1983, and not opened until Gus’ final diagnosis was revealed.”
October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I — I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem as ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Gus.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.
Celestia glowered as she put down the letter. “That’s it!” she declared in a low voice. “We’re going to save the Professor.”
Luna was taken aback—it was the first sign of her sister’s old personality since the Nightmare’s emergence. “The best medical minds of the planet have done everything possible for the poor man. What can we do that they can’t? Cheat Death?”
“Yes,” Celestia said with a determined little smile. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”