There is a certain hubris to science, a belief that the more we learn about technology and develop it, the better our lives will be.
— TIO HOLTZMAN,
acceptance speech for Service to Poritrin Award
Each time she solved one part of the foldspace navigation problem, the answer seemed to move that much farther out of reach, dancing away like mythical fairy lights in a forest of ancient legend. Norma Cenva had already progressed beyond the ability of any other genius to comprehend what she had done, but she would not let the challenge defeat her.
Engrossed in her work, Norma sometimes forgot to eat, sleep, or even move more than her eyes or her writing stylus. For days on end, she pressed forward relentlessly, consuming little nourishment other than melange. Her reconfigured body seemed to draw power from elsewhere, and her mind demanded the spice in order to think on the stratospheric levels where her thoughts lay.
Long ago, back in the most human time of her life, she and Aurelius had spent hours together talking, eating, experiencing the simple joys of life. Despite what had happened to her, Aurelius had always been her anchor to that humanity. In the years without him, though, her thoughts were cut adrift, and her preoccupation became more intense.
Her manipulated body attempted to set itself to her demanding schedule. Internal systems slowed in order to conserve and direct energy where it was required, compensating for the expenditures of her weighty thoughts. She did not concern herself with directly supervising the cellular interactions. Norma had more important things on her mind.
Not interested in the weather or even the seasons on Kolhar, Norma rarely bothered to look out her office windows. She glanced at the construction activities only to reassure herself that the work continued under Adrien’s supervision, now that he had returned from Arrakis.
Her calculation chambers stood in the shadow of a large new cargo ship in dry dock. According to schedule, this craft would undergo full power-up soon, preparatory to its actual launch and a shakedown flight. Sunlight glinted off of its nearly complete skin.
Men in white worksuits performed final inspections, scrambling around on the hull, buoyed by suspensor belts. Three technicians worked upside down, making adjustments on the underside of the vessel. The ship would use conventional, safe spaceflight technology, but had been designed to accommodate Holtzman engines. For decades, Norma had insisted that all VenKee ships be ready for the inevitable future, preparing for the day when she solved the navigation problem.
Struck by another way to manipulate an equation, she turned back to her calculational table. She used a combination of prime numbers and empirical formulas, entering them side by side on an electronic drawing board. Since the basic problem involved folding space, and since mathematics attempted to reproduce reality, Norma physically folded the columns over on top of themselves one or more times, providing multi-level views that revealed intriguing alignments. But Norma found it impossible to write down with mere words and numbers what she sought. She needed to visualize the universe and lay out the conundrum by actually layering her thoughts on themselves.
For a long while, the fresh melange sang through her mind, sharpening her thoughts and insights. She stared at the calculations in front of her, as motionless as one of the ancient statues commissioned by the Titans on Earth, before the human uprising had torn them all down.
From outside, she barely heard the familiar whine of heavy spaceflight engines and the changing pitches of pre-takeoff test cycles. Gradually, as the external noise increased, Norma retreated inward, focusing on her own mental galaxy. One of her greatest skills, and needs, had always been to drive away all distractions.
To enhance her efforts, she reached unconsciously to her open supply tray and palmed three more melange capsules, ingesting them in rapid succession. The odor of cinnamon filled the air she breathed, and she felt a calming wind inside, as if her body were the desert where the spice had come from and a great, cleansing sandstorm had begun to blow. Thoughts were brighter, clearer; the background annoyance faded.
How to see a navigation problem before it occurred? How to anticipate a disaster that happened in the tiniest shaved fraction of a second? At such speeds, one had to prepare and react before any evidence of a problem appeared— but that was impossible, violating all notions of causality. No reaction could exist before the initial action occurred….
In the shipyards an explosion rolled like thunder, accompanied by the sounds of crashing sheets of plaz and crumpling metal plates. Heavy components thudded to the ground, wrecking storage buildings and screeching across paved work yards, as if a massive cymek force had attacked Kolhar. The shockwave rocked Norma’s laboratory building and bowed the outer walls inward. Overpressure cracked plaz windows on the opposite side of her calculation chamber.
She didn’t hear it. Papers, her cup, and some drafting implements fell to the floor, but not the electronic sketch board, which she gripped in her hands, freezing it in place before her fixated eyes. For her, very little existed in the entire universe other than these numbers and formulas.
Sirens and klaxons went off, and secondary explosions boomed across the shipyard. Men shouted. Emergency crews rushed to the site of the disaster, rescuing the injured as other workers fled. Like a living blanket, flames spread across the entire building, curtaining her window, scorching and eating away at the walls— but Norma no longer looked in that direction. Though her body did not move, her mind performed complex mental acrobatics, examining different angles, diverse possibilities. Picking up speed, momentum. Closer and closer…
So many alternatives. But which one will work?
Acrid smoke oozed through the burst seals in her walls, penetrating the cracked plaz windows and crossing the floor toward her. The chemical flames roared hotter. Outside, the screams grew louder.
So close to a solution, an answer at last!
Norma scribbled new entries on the drawing board, adding a third column that incorporated the factor of spacetime in relation to distance and travel. On a whim, she used the galactic coordinates of Arrakis for a baseline, as if the desert world was the center of the universe. It provided her with a new perspective. Excited, Norma aligned three columns as unexpected thoughts occurred to her.
Three is a holy number: the Trinity. The key?
She thought also of the Golden Mean, known to the Grogyptians of Old Earth. Mentally, she placed three points on a line, designating A and B at each end, with C positioned in between so that the distance AC / CB = ?. This was the Grogyptian letter phi, a decimal of approximately 1.618. It was known that a line segment divided by the ? ratio could be folded on itself repeatedly, creating the ratio over and over, infinitely. A simple and obvious relationship, but basic. Elemental.
This mathematical truth suggested a religious connection to her, and made her wonder about the source of her own developing revelation. Divine inspiration? Science and religion both sought to explain esoteric mysteries of the universe, though they approached the solution from fundamentally different directions.
Arrakis. The ancient Muadru were said to have come from there, or settled there for a time in their wanderings. The spiral was their most sacred symbol.
Hardly able to contain herself, oblivious to the chaos and turmoil that engulfed the shipyards and her own building, she arranged the three columns in a physical spiral with the Arrakis factor in the middle, and again began to fold the columns over and over. More and more complex equations resulted, and she felt herself on the brink of a breakthrough.
In her blistering hands, the electronic drawing board had begun to smolder, but with a simple thought Norma obliterated the damage to her skin and to the equipment. Flames leaped around her, consuming her clothing and hair, roasting her skin. Each instant, she used the energy to rebuild her cells almost as an afterthought, to keep everything stable around her, so that she could continue. On the verge—
Loud and furious movement intruded into the universe of her calculations. A man, bellowing in a deep voice, grabbed her shoulders, knocked the electronic pad out of her hands, and hauled her roughly out of the divine place in her mind.
“What are you doing? Leave me alone!”
But the man would not listen. He wore an unusual suit… thick red material, completely covering his body… and a glossy but soot-stained helmet. He manhandled her through a crackling wall of flames and greasy black and purple smoke. Finally Norma became conscious of the discomfort to her body, her skin, and saw that she was naked. All of her garments had burned off, as if in her mental journey into the heart of the cosmos she had accidentally plunged through the cauldron of a sun.
With a concentrated effort, she focused on her internal chemistry, felt the changes as she restored her damaged cells organ by organ, section by section, treating her own injuries. Her mind was intact, and her body was easily repaired, simply an organic vessel to hold her increasingly abstruse thoughts. She couldn’t, however, re-create her clothes… not that it mattered to her.
Outside the burning calculation chamber, medical attendants placed her on a cot and wrapped her in a healing blanket. They began to take her vital signs.
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” Norma struggled to break free, but two strong men held her down.
Adrien rushed over, looking distraught. “Be calm, Mother. You’ve been burned, and you need to let these people take care of you. Two men died trying to rescue you from the inferno.”
“That was unnecessary. A complete waste. Why would they risk themselves when I can easily rebuild my body?” She looked down at herself. “I’m not burned— just distracted.” Her body began to feel cooler as she repaired the epidermal structures of her skin, vastly accelerating the catalysts in the healing blanket. “See for yourselves.”
A doctor shouted to the attendants. Something pricked her arm, an injection. She performed a chemical analysis on the fluid as it flowed into her veins— a fast-acting sedative— and used her powers to counteract the effect. She sat up, pushed the healing blanket away from her. The attendants rushed to stop her, but she extended her arms. “No burns anywhere. I am intact.”
Startled medical personnel pulled back and allowed her to finish. Norma focused on her face and neck, which had not yet received the full force of her curative powers, and erased deep burns and then a few superficial blisters. She touched the rough skin of her face, felt it smooth out and cool.
“My body is under my control. I have reconstructed it before— as you well know, Adrien.”
Norma rose to her feet, letting the healing blanket fall to the ground. Everyone looked at her in disbelief. Aside from her hair, which she had not yet restored, her milky skin was almost perfect except for a large red blotch on one shoulder. Catching sight of it, Norma focused her restorative powers, and the persistent blemish disappeared.
Curious, she thought. For weeks, the red area had been getting larger, requiring her periodic attention to clear it away. Previously, everything about her appearance had remained in place automatically, requiring no conscious effort after the initial metamorphosis.
Adrien hurried to cover his mother’s nakedness with the blanket, while the emergency teams continued to struggle to get the shipyard fires under control.
“I need to get back to work right away,” Norma said. “Please see that no one interrupts me again. And, Adrien— trust me next time. Some of my choices may seem odd to others, but they are a necessary part of my work. I cannot explain it further.”
Too much commotion around here, she thought. Since she no longer had an office in which to work, Norma walked purposefully off toward a rocky hill near the shipyard, a promontory on which she could sit and think in peace.