Harsh Oases (43 page)

Gunnar’s dairy products justified his life; every sensible newcomer to El Dorado county learned to seek out Elf Circle Farm’s rich creamy milk, sunny butter, and bold cheeses. And on Saturdays, people would visit the farm to buy in person from cheerful, bustling Gunnar.

It was Gunnar himself who gave Elf Circle Farm its name; his parents had preferred to call it Little Jutland. Gunnar’s hobby was the lore of Scandinavian elves and trolls: he collected books, wood and china figurines, drawings and paintings, and he wasn’t above placing plastic and concrete lawn-dwarves in his yard, another draw for the Saturday shoppers.

Growing up in a floodplain-flat development in the Sacramento sprawl, Jory had loved visiting the old family farm; his mother Karin would send him there for a few weeks every summer. Jory would work in the bam, swim in the creek, climb trees, hunt mushrooms, romp with the gruff and careless farm dogs, and have a heart-breakingly wonderful time—all this less than a hundred miles from the plastic, mall-world, monoculture development-hell of modem life.

After an evening meal of yogurt, cheese, brown bread, and fresh greens, Jory and his uncle would sit on the lantern-lit porch, Gunnar telling stories about the unseen little folk, his thin, lively face creased with shadows, his guileless blue eyes now twinkling with glee, now round with wonder.

Jory’s mother Karin had a grudge against her brother Gunnar; there was bad blood over the fact that their parents had bequeathed Gunnar a lifetime tenancy at Elf Circle Farm. The will did specify that, should Gunnar ever sell off any of the land, he was obligated to evenly share the proceeds with his only sibling. But subdividing the farm was something Gunnar adamantly refused to discuss.

Jory’s pig-faced stepfather Dick was a realtor, and of course Gunnar’s intransigence drove him frantic. When Dick was around, you couldn’t mention Gunnar or elves, or, by extension, talk about anything at all fantastic or unusual. Jory was glad to leave for college, and from then on he generally avoided visiting Karin and Dick. Karin didn’t miss Jory all that much; Dick had sired three pig-children for her to care for. And she and Dick were quite busy at their church.

All through college and grad school, and on through his years as assistant physics professor at Chico State and as full professor at UC Santa Cruz, Jory kept visiting Uncle Gunnar. Jory would drive across the central valley and up into the Sierra foothills to visit the old farm whenever he was distressed by department politics, by his unsuccessful relationships with women, or by setbacks in his work toward distilling antigravity from his rhizomal subdimension theory. Comfortably tired from the chores, sitting around the crackling hearth at night drinking caraway-seed-flavored aquavit, swapping his physics speculations for Gunnar’s tales of Elfland, Jory had come to consider his uncle as an incredibly wise and fortunate man.

But then came Uncle Gunnar’s stroke, too early. The man was fit as an eel and only seventy. Nevertheless the hammer fell.

Released from the hospital after long painful weeks of partially successful rehabilitation, Uncle Gunnar could barely make himself understood, and he needed two canes to walk. His cattle had disappeared—rustlers were suspected—not that Gunnar had the strength to care for his dairy business anymore. Karin wanted him to move into an assisted-living facility right away; there’d be no lack of money once they began developing the family land. But Gunnar insisted on spending a night in his cold farmhouse alone. The next day a woman from the post office found him hanging by his neck in the bam.

Karin freaked out; it was up to Jory to manage the funeral arrangements. He’d even had to identify Gunnar at the morgue. The farm went to Karin, and stepfather Dick attempted to develop a gated community called, just as before, Elf Circle Farm. But Dick screwed up the zoning applications, the permits, and the financing. He failed to pay the properly taxes. He misrepresented the condition of the land to potential investors and attempted to sell three of the lots to two separate speculators. A half-dozen court cases bloomed and, ten years later, nothing had been built.

Meanwhile Jory’s mother had died, leaving the tangled estate to Jory and his three piggish siblings—who’d so far balked at anything like an equitable final settlement. If only there were some way to sort out the mess, Jory would have loved to settle for some acreage including the house, the creek, and the woods with the mushroom glen—a bit less than a fourth of the property.

But for now, Gunnar’s house stood empty with its windows smashed, the lawn-dwarves shotgunned, and the roof in tatters—amid half-finished dirt roads scraped into the pasture-land, surrounded by barbed-wire fences with No Trespassing signs.

Jory had been a professor for going on thirty-eight years now; he was sixty-four. This spring the state had offered Jory a golden handshake to encourage his retirement. The offer was attractive. Jory’s student-evaluation ratings had been drifting ever lower. He was tired of teaching and sick of faculty politics. As for his rhizomal subdimension research—he hadn’t been able to get a paper published in ten years. Not since Gunnar had died. There was that one antigravity experiment he’d kept hoping to complete—but maybe it was really hopeless. He had every reason to retire, but still he hesitated.

How had he gotten so old, so fast? He’d never gotten any closer to antigravity than he’d been when he had the first inspiration for rhizomal subdimension theory—it had come in the midst of a psychedelic drug trip, if the truth be told.

Yes, the very summer when Jory had been casting about for a topic for his physics thesis—good Lord, that was forty years ago—he’d found a ring of magic mushrooms in a glen in the woods across the creek that cut through Gunnar’s farm. Turned out Gunnar knew about the mushrooms, not that he was interested in eating them. Gunnar claimed he’d once seen tiny old men and a single beautiful elf-woman dancing around the circle in the invisible light of the new moon.

Jory hadn’t seen dancing elves; he’d seen a hailstorm of bejeweled polyhedra. He’d begun hopping from one to the other, climbing them like stepping-stones, like moving platforms in a videogame. The name for a new science—”rhizomal subdimension theory”—came in a crystalline flash from a blazing rhombicosidodecahedron. And quickly this incantatory phrase led to a supernal white-light vision of a new quantum cosmology.

Our familiar dimensions of space and time are statistical averages that happen to have emerged around irregular fault lines, planes, and hyperplanes that percolate through the supersymmetric sea of quantum foam that underlies reality. Above is spacetime, below is the foam. Jory’s deeper insight was of a subdimensional domain lying under the foam, just as surely as topsoil, clay, and schist lie beneath a composted forest floor. And within this subdimensional bulk there may live, mayhap, a race of gnawing, crawling tunnelers.

As the full force of the mushrooms hit him, Jory realized that the word “rhizome” was the true gift from the Muse. Our world of coherent supradimensional 3+1 spacetime is like a fat spot in a ginger root, a nodule covered with, ah yes, tiny root hairs. With a bit of technical finagling it should be possible to coax fundamental particles onto these omnipresent root hairs—thus draining inconvenient masses and forces down through reality’s quantum foam floor, down into the subdimensions.

Jory’s thesis treated the question of how to divert, in particular, gravitons. Given the equivalence between physics and information theory, such a subdimensional rerouting was simply a matter of constructing the right kind of quantum-computing circuit, although there were some googolplex possible circuits to be considered. How to find the right one? Why not let genetic algorithms perform a Darwinian search!

For a few years, Jory’s theories had been all the rage—and he’d surfed his wave of publicity from sleepy Chico State to a full professorship at UC Santa Cruz. But progress had stalled soon thereafter. Jory’s genetic algorithms didn’t in fact converge any faster than blind search, and thus far he’d never gotten his key antigravity experiment to work.

To the not-so-hidden amusement of his colleagues, he’d compactified his experiment to pocket size. The apparatus was a quarkonium-based quantum computer coupled to a four-way thumb button with a tiny video screen; he’d in fact cannibalized a mini-videogame machine to make it. According to orthodox rhizomal subdimension theory, if someone could miraculously deliver a proper sequence of presses to the button, the field-programmed quantum circuit would begin diverting gravitons into the subdimensions. And whoever held the talisman would be able to fly. The ultimate keyboard cheat

Perhaps this was all nonsense. It was high time for Jory to give up and go home to his cruddy apartment in the scuzzy beach flats of Santa Cruz. But what would he do, alone in his jumbled rooms? Hang himself?

If only Jory had someone close to confide in, someone to understand his problems. But, like Uncle Gunnar, he’d never found a lasting mate. He’d played the field, lived with a few women, but all had come to naught. And his fellow professors were only half-tolerant of Jory’s wild ideas. Indeed, at least one of his peers would be positively gleeful to see him go.

His office-mate, Professor Hilda Kuhl.

Victim of its own success in attracting students, UC Santa Cruz had a space problem. Classes were being conducted in trailers. Every lab bench held double the number of experimenters. The dining halls resembled feedlots. And so the small, dark offices of the physics faculty were doing double duty.

One rainy afternoon in the spring of what boded to be his final semester as a professor—and perhaps the final year of his life—Jory was sitting at his messy desk, the forms for his retirement spread out in a space cleared among the tottering mounds of paper. For now he was turning his attention to the lone talisman that contained any solace for him: his quantum computer with its open-sesame button, the distillation of his dreams and intellectual flights of fancy. Jory’s thumb worked the four-point keypad ceaselessly, feeling for yet another combination of pulses that would finally open up the interplenary growth of rhizomal threads. Although he enjoyed staring at the fractally patterned feedback graphics on his little screen, Jory didn’t really need to keep conscious track of the current sequence, as the computer recorded his touches for future readout, if necessary. The button-clicking had long ago assumed the nature of a subliminal tic, obsessive-compulsive in nature.

Hilda Kuhl was at the other desk, four or five feet away. They generally sat back to back, ignoring each other. But now she interrupted his reverie.

“Gotten any breakthroughs lately, Sorenson? Figured out how many gravitons can dance on the tip of a quantum root-hair?”

Jory didn’t dignify this with an answer; he simply turned and stared blankly at her while continuing to manipulate his device.

Hilda was an attractive woman in her thirties, given to understated gray suits and pale silk blouses. She wore minimal makeup—just lipstick—and her brown hair was cropped to a sensible bob. Though some thirty years younger than Jory, she was a highly respected physicist with almost as many peer citations as Feynman.

Hilda was divorced, living in a condo with her six-year-old son Jack. She had a nice car, a BMW. Her ex-husband was a software engineer. She was having some trouble juggling motherhood and her job. She was hoping her mother would move in with her; the mother presently was a county clerk in the Sierra foothills.

Most of this Jory knew only at secondhand; he and Hilda didn’t chitchat much. The two of them had been through some ugly turf-wars over the graduate curriculum, especially the Quantum Cosmology course. These days Hilda’s goal seemed to be to drive Jory out, by any psychological means available, however cruel.

“I’m so sick of seeing you diddling that little button,” said Hilda. “It’s masturbatory. Sad and embarrassing.” She sniffed the air sharply and shook her head. “It stinks in here too. You must have forgotten a sandwich in your desk again. My mother’s going to be visiting from Placerville today, which I why I mention all this. She’s trying to decide if she should retire and move to Santa Cruz. She wants to check out the campus drama club. Could you try not to seem like a senile pig?”

Jory felt his neck heat up. Stepfather Dick was the pig, not him. He strove to maintain his calm. “Is that any way for one respectable scientist to speak to another?”

Hilda rummaged in her clunky handbag the size of a burglar’s satchel, producing a bottle of noxious-looking sports drink. “Oh please, Sorenson, you stopped being respectable a decade or two ago! I admired you when I was an undergrad, but those days are long gone.” She took a swig of her electric blue drink and peered at the drifts of paper on his desk. “Do I see retirement forms? Be still, my heart!”

Jory had a sudden sense of how Uncle Gunnar must have felt with the noose around his neck, while standing on an overturned milk bucket.

“I haven’t signed them yet,” he said. “I’m thinking it over.”

“I can help you clean out your stuff when you’re ready,” said Hilda. “I hear the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot museum is looking for donations. Not to mention the groundskeepers’ compost heap.”

Jory turned away, working his little keypad more frenetically than ever. With his other hand he any-keyed his desktop machine out of sleep mode, donning a pair of headphones and calling up one of his favorite tunes—Nikolay Karlovich Medtner’s Op. 48, No. 2: “Elf’s Fairy Tale.”

After several minutes, joggled by Jory’s twitching, one of the paper mounds on his desk subsided to the floor, the laminar flow reaching all the way across the room. Jory braced himself for Hilda Kuhl’s reaction. But she was gone. Relieved in some small degree, his left thumb slowing in its compulsive writhing, he doffed his headphones and stood up to stretch.