Phase Space (17 page)

‘How come nobody before ever noticed such a fundamental aspect of our DNA?’

Himmelfarb shrugged. ‘We weren’t looking. And besides, the basic purpose of human DNA is construction. Its sequences of nucleotides are job orders and blueprints for making molecular machine tools. Proteins, built by DNA, built
you,
officer, who learned, fortuitously, to think, and question your origins.’ She winked at Philmus. ‘Here is a prediction. In environments where resources for building, for growing, are scarce – the deep sea vents, or even the volcanic seams of Mars where life might be clinging, trapped by five billion years of ice – we will find much stronger evidence of macromolecular sentience. Rocky dreams on Mars, officer!’

The Monsignor said dryly, ‘If we ever get to Mars we can check that. And if you’d bothered to write up your progress in an orderly manner we might have a way to verify your conclusions.’

The dead priest smiled indulgently. ‘I am not – was not – a very good reductionist, I am afraid. In my arrogance, officer, I took the step which has damned me.’

‘Which was?’

Her face was open, youthful, too smooth. ‘Studying minds in test tubes wasn’t enough.
I wanted to contact the latent consciousness embedded in my own DNA.
I was curious. I wanted to share its oceanic dream. I injected myself with a solution consisting of a buffer solution and certain receptor mechanisms which –’

‘And did it work?’

She smiled. ‘Does it matter? Perhaps now you have your answer, Monsignor. I am Faust; I am Frankenstein. I even have the right accent! I am the obsessed scientist, driven by her greed for godless knowledge, who allowed her own creation to destroy her. There is your story –’

Philmus said, ‘I’ll decide that … Eva, what did it feel like?’

Himmelfarb hesitated, and her face clouded with pixels. ‘Frustrating. Like trying to glimpse a wonderful landscape through a pinhole. The organelles operate at a deep, fundamental level … And perhaps they enjoy a continuous consciousness that reaches back to their formation in the primeval sea five billion years ago. Think of that. They are part of the universe as I can never be, behind the misty walls of my senses; they know the universe as I never could. All I could do – like Dante – is interpret their vision with my own limited language and mathematics.’

So here’s where Dante fits in.
‘You’re saying
Dante
went through this experience?’

‘It was the source of the
Comedy.
Yes.’

‘But Dante was not injected with receptors. How could he –’

‘But we all share the deeper mystery, the DNA molecule itself. Perhaps in some of us it awakens naturally, as I forced in my own body … And now, I will show you the central mystery of Dante’s vision.’

Boyle said, ‘I think we’re slowing.’

Himmelfarb said, ‘We’re approaching the ninth sphere.’

‘The Primum Mobile,’ said the Monsignor.

‘Yes. The “first moving part”, the root of time and space. Turned by angels, expressing their love for God … Look up,’ Himmelfarb said to Philmus. ‘What do you see?’

At first, only structureless light. But then, a texture …

Suddenly Philmus was looking, up beyond the Primum Mobile, into another glass onion, a nesting of transparent spheres that surrounded – not a dull lump of clay like Earth – but a brilliant point of light. The nearest spheres were huge, like curving wings, as large as the spheres of the outer planets.

Himmelfarb said, ‘They are the spheres of the angels, which surround the universe’s other pole, which is God. Like a mirror image of Hell. Counting out from here we have the angels, archangels, principalities, powers –’

‘I don’t get it,’ Philmus said. ‘
What
other pole? How can a sphere have two centres?’

‘Think about the equator,’ whispered Himmelfarb. ‘The globe of Earth, remember? As you travel north, as you pass the equator, the concentric circles of latitude start to grow smaller, while still enclosing those to the south …’

‘We aren’t on the surface of a globe.’

‘
But we are on the surface of a 3-sphere – the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere.
Do you see? The concentric spheres you see are exactly analogous to the lines of latitude on the two-dimensional surface of a globe. And just as, if you stand on the equator of Earth, you can look back to the south pole or forward to the north pole, so here, at the universe’s equator, we can look towards the poles of Earth or God. The Primum Mobile, the equator of the universe, curves around the Earth, below us, and at the same time it curves around God, above us.’

Philmus looked back and forth, from God to Earth, and she saw, incredibly, that Himmelfarb was right. The Primum Mobile curved two ways at once.

The Monsignor’s jaw seemed to be hanging open. ‘And Dante
saw
this? A four-dimensional artefact? He
described
it?’

‘As remarkable as it seems – yes,’ said Himmelfarb. ‘Read the poem again if you don’t believe it: around the year 1320 Dante Alighiero wrote down a precise description of the experience of travelling through a 3-sphere. When I figured this out, I couldn’t believe it myself. It was like finding a revolver in a layer of dinosaur fossils.’

Philmus said, ‘But how is it possible … ?’

‘
It was not Dante,
’ Himmelfarb said. ‘It was the sentient organelles within him who had the true vision, which Dante interpreted in terms of his medieval cosmology. We know he had wrestled with the paradox that he lived in a universe which was simultaneously centred on Earth, and on God … This offered him a geometric resolution. It is a fantastic hypothesis, but it does explain how four-dimensional geometry, unexplored by the mathematicians until the nineteenth century, found expression in a poem of the early Renaissance.’ She grinned, mischievously. ‘Or perhaps Dante was a time traveller. What do you think?’

The Monsignor growled, ‘Are we done?’

‘ … You know we aren’t,’ Himmelfarb said gently.

Philmus felt overwhelmed; she longed to return to solid ground. ‘After this, what else can there be?’

‘The last canto,’ the Monsignor whispered.

Himmelfarb said, ‘Yes. The last canto, which defeated even Dante. But, seven centuries later, I was able to go further.’

Philmus stared into her glowing eyes. ‘Tell us.’

And the three of them, like birds hovering beneath the domed roof of a cathedral, ascended into the Empyrean.

They passed into a layer of darkness, like a storm cloud.

The hemispheres of the 3-sphere – the Earth and its nested spheres, the globes of the angels – faded like stars at dawn. But Himmelfarb’s eyes glowed brightly.

And then, space folded away.

Philmus could still see Boyle, Himmelfarb, the priest’s shining eyes. But she couldn’t tell how near or far the others were. And when she tried to look away from them, her eyes slid over an elusive darkness, deeper than the darkness inside her own skull.

There was no structure beyond the three of them, their relative positions. She felt as small as an electron, as huge as a galaxy. She felt lost.

She clung to Himmelfarb’s hand. ‘Where are we? How far –’

‘We are outside the Primum Mobile: beyond duration, beyond the structure of space. Dante understood this place. “There near and far neither add nor subtract …” You know, we underestimate Dante. The physicists are the worst. They see us all running around as Virtuals in the memory of some giant computer of the future. Not to mention the science fiction writers. Garbage. Dante understood that a soul is not a Virtual, and in the
Paradiso,
he was trying to express the transhuman experience of true eternity –’

‘
What did he see
?’

Himmelfarb smiled. ‘Watch.’

… Philmus saw light, like the image of God at the centre of the angels’ spheres. It was a point, and yet it filled space and time. And then it unfolded, like a flower blooming, with particles and lines
(world lines? quantum functions?)
billowing out and rushing past her face, in an insubstantial breeze. Some of the lines tangled, and consciousness sparked – trapped in time, briefly shouting its joy at its moment of awareness – before dissipating once more. But still the unfolding continued, in a fourth, fifth, sixth direction, in ways she could somehow, if briefly, conceive.

She felt a surge of joy. And there was something more, something just beyond her grasp –

It was gone. She was suspended in the structureless void again. Himmelfarb grasped her hand.

Boyle was curled over on himself, his eyes clamped closed.

Philmus said, ‘I saw –’

Himmelfarb said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We all see something different. And besides, it was only a Virtual shadow … What did you
feel
?’

Philmus hesitated. ‘As I do when I solve a case. When the pieces come together.’

Himmelfarb nodded. ‘Cognition. Scientists understand that. The ultimate cognition, knowing reality.’

‘But now it’s gone.’ She felt desolate.

‘I know.’ Himmelfarb’s grip tightened. ‘I’m sorry.’

The Monsignor, his voice weak, murmured, ‘“I saw gathered … / Bound up by love in a single volume / All the leaves scattered through the universe; / Substance and accidents and their relations, / But yet fused together in such a manner / That what I am talking about is a simple light …”’

‘Dante was very precise about how he interpreted what he saw,’ said Himmelfarb. ‘This is Aristotelian physics. “Substances” and “accidents” describe phenomena and their relationships. I believe that
Dante was trying to describe a glimpse of the unification of nature.
’

‘Yes,’ Philmus whispered.

‘And then he saw a paradox that he expresses by an image. Three circles, superimposed, of the same size – and yet of different colours.’

‘Separated by a higher dimension,’ Philmus guessed.

‘Yes. In the high-dimensional artefact Dante saw a metaphor for the Trinity. God’s three personalities in one being.’

‘Ah,’ said the Monsignor, cautiously uncurling. ‘But
you
saw –’

‘Rather more. I knew enough physics –’

‘This is the basis of the new unified theory,’ Philmus said. ‘A unification of phenomena through the structure of a higher-dimensional space.’

Himmelfarb’s face was turning to pixels again. ‘It isn’t as simple as that,’ she said. ‘The whole notion of dimensionality is an approximate one that only emerges in a semi-classical context – well. I don’t suppose it matters now. I wrote it down as fast as I could, as far as I could remember it, as best I could express it. I don’t think I could give any more.’

The Monsignor looked disappointed.

Philmus said, ‘And then –’

‘I killed myself,’ Himmelfarb said bluntly. Bathed in sourceless light, she seemed to withdraw from Philmus. ‘You have to understand.
It wasn’t me.
I had hoped to find enlightenment. But
I
was not enhanced. It was the organelles’ vision which leaked into my soul, and which I glimpsed.’

‘And that was what you could not bear,’ the Monsignor said. Hanging like a toy in mid-air, he nodded complacently; evidently, Philmus thought, he had learned what had come to find, and Himmelfarb’s essential untidiness – so distressing to Boyle’s bureaucrat’s heart – was gone. Now she was safely dead, her story closed.

Philmus thought that over, and decided she would prosecute.

But she also sensed that Boyle knew more than he was telling her. And besides … ‘I think you’re wrong, Monsignor.’

Boyle raised his eyebrows. Himmelfarb hovered between them, saying nothing.

‘Eva didn’t quite finish showing us the last canto. Did you?’

The priest closed her eyes. ‘After the vision of the multidimensional circle, Dante says: “That circle … / When my eyes examined it rather more / Within itself, and in its own colour, / Seemed to be painted with our effigy …”’

‘I don’t understand,’ the Monsignor admitted.

Philmus said, ‘Dante saw a human face projected on his multidimensional artefact. He interpreted whatever he saw as the Incarnation: the embodiment of God – beyond time and space – in our time-bound mortal form. The final paradox of your Christian theology.’