Lifeline

The Earth press and intercolony communications dubbed the life-forms “sail-creatures.” Sandovaal would have preferred something more elegant, but the name stuck.

CENTER FOR HIGH-TECHNOLOGY MATERIALS ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

Colors rippled as Karen Langelier tuned the laser to a different wavelength. The color jumped as it locked onto the new material’s resonance structure, glowing a deep red. A long, thin liquid strand of phenolic began to crawl up the beam. She pressed the laser goggles against her high cheekbones to lean over the vacuum vessel. Afraid to breathe, she watched as the phenolic drew out, thinner and thinner, approaching the limit of visibility.

Just as she began to adjust the probe, the delicate strand broke. Globules of pulsating bubbles crashed into each other throughout the vessel, striking the walls.

“Damn!” Karen turned from the vacuum vessel. “Three strikes and I’m out today!”

The new article in the Online Review of Scientific Instruments seemed clear enough—laser filamentation was a well-documented process, known for decades. She had arranged the experiment to duplicate the test conditions. It wasn’t like she was new at this, either. Maybe there was some problem with the phenolic she had used.

Karen knew she would be a grouch tonight when she got home, and Ray would probably spend the evening talking about the cases in his law office. He wouldn’t even notice she’d had a bad day.

“Well, then,” Karen said out loud, “I’ll just have to make it a good day for myself.”

Expelling a breath, she turned back to the three-dimensional holotank. “Let’s walk through this one last time.” She slapped at the library control panel and called up the article again. “And I’ve got to stop talking to myself.”

As the manuscript popped into the tank, she saw that her fingers had transposed two digits on the recall memory, pulling up instead the backlog of papers from Physical Review Letters she still intended to read. Karen leaned forward to correct her mistake, but scanned down the list of contents. Her personal screener program had highlighted everything that matched its preprogrammed subset of Karen Langelier’s interests. And near the top of the list appeared the title, “Filamentation in One and a Half Dimensions.”

She pursed her lips, then smiled. “Serendipity, I suppose.”

The author list surprised her. Not content to publish innovative works in only Russian-language journals, Soviet researchers increasingly submitted their most promising work to the prestigious Letters. Karen pointed at the article listing and a window flashed open, displaying the contents.

She raised her eyebrows. Published only weeks ago, the Soviet paper presented an elegant yet practical method of constructing one-and-a-half-dimensional strands.

Forgetting her own polymer fiber problem for the moment, she burrowed into the paper and started reading at her “scientific” speed. Lips moving, forehead creased with concentration, Karen began to digest every syllable and equation in the file.

One-and-a-half dimensions.… The concept made her mind reel, but with fascination, like wrestling with a paradox.

Karen allowed her mind to wander. Infinity, possibilities. She knew an embryonic answer floated somewhere at the back of her mind. She could access it with careful stroking, off-center concentration.…

When she had been a young undergraduate, back when the outside world seemed unattached to her reality, Karen would spend hours contemplating irrational numbers. She felt that her understanding gave her some form of control over them. They weren’t infinite where they started—she held one end of the irrational number, the part she could see. A number like pi, simply the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, starting with 3.14159.… But the rest of the number rolled away from her, an ever-changing sequence infinitely long.

And she could control that number by knowing what it was. She could hold one end of a magical, mystical sequence that lasted forever.

Back then Karen had realized she was different. Not strange, just different—and content to be. She couldn’t relate to the conversations of her dorm mates, the giggling stories, the meaningless concerns. She had a communication problem with them, and she didn’t want to take the time to learn their dialect. Instead, she grew to master her own language, a way of communicating with the precise sciences. Mathematics.

One-and-a-half dimensions …

She closed her eyes now, imagining that she was part of the filament, floating just outside its structure, like an irrational number. The Soviet paper had elegantly shown the full solution in closed form—and now, as Karen drifted there, it all made perfect sense. The answer was inside herself, inside her capabilities, if only she knew how to bring it to the light of day.