Many of her early memories involved the floor of the lab, the feet and ankles of scientists all around her. When she was very young she was given antique models of elements to play with. She was given a kit of wooden parts to make up atoms. Hayato blew up latex gloves, stolen from the biology department, and made turkeys of them with a felt-tipped pen. She was not taught nursery rhymes about geese and kings but about molecules: Here lies dear old Harry, dead upon the floor. What he thought was H2O was H2SO4. She was named the mascot of the Steiner Lab, and there was a photograph of her dressed as a punch card to prove it.
She attended most formal meetings that the Steiner Lab conducted and she attended informal meetings, too, ducking in and out of offices at will, sitting still at the round brown table in the main room when the lab had lunch all together. And listening—always listening.
The theory of language immersion posits that a language is best learned by placing the learner into what is in effect a natural habitat, or a simulated habitat that strives for authenticity. Thus a student of Spanish will learn best not when she is taught to conjugate verbs but when she is surrounded by useful Spanish—not when she is taught Spanish for its own sake, but when she is taught every other subject in Spanish, too. More by default than intent, Ada was thus immersed in mathematics, neurology, physics, philosophy, computer science. She did not begin with Lisp, but with compiler design. In her physics lessons at home with David, she did not begin with s = d/t, but with the Grand Unified Theory. For the first years of her life, she did not know what she was hearing. Listening to David and his colleagues was like listening to radio chatter in a different language. And then, without knowing it or taking note of it, she began to be able to follow their conversations. By ten she was able to be a sounding board for her father as he worked out his ideas—not resolving them or bettering them, necessarily, but posing questions to him that were reasonable, and occasionally jarring something loose in him. When this happened, he reported Ada’s concern or comment to the rest of the lab with some seriousness at the next lab meeting, and a slow glowing warmth spread throughout her, because she had made herself useful to the group, whom she thought of, always, as her peers.
“A good question, I think, Ada,” David would say, and the rest of them would nod in agreement, and the group would move forward as one.
This was what Ada pictured when she thought of her father, the vision of David that she harbored and kept safe throughout her life, the idea pinned permanently to the sleepiest part of her brain: it was her father in his laboratory, or at Tran’s Restaurant; or in the library of the institute that employed him; or, rarely, in a crowd of friends; or, regularly, at his desk, in his small absurd office in their home, contemplating a chessboard, his head as bald and round and sturdy as a pawn’s. His woolen socks with holes in them. His hands the steeple of a church. He was tall and thin and rigorous in his studies and in his life, and he was inventive, and he was very warm and betrayed no one ever, and in Ada’s mind he was ethical beyond compare, and he had a habit of rubbing his hands together quickly when he was delighted or moved, and he was quick and spry and gentle and able with his limbs and head. He was dexterous, and his fingernails were clean, and he was wise, and he was intent upon seeking out the best and most beautiful versions of pieces by Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, and Bach, and he knew excellent riddles, and his name was Dr. David Sibelius, and she never called him anything but David.
In the weeks and months that followed the dinner party, no one mentioned its strange end to Ada, her father’s sudden lapse, or asked her any questions about David’s increasingly odd behavior. Occasionally, at the lab, she felt as if she and David were being excluded from something: where formerly Liston or Charles-Robert would have welcomed her into any room—discussed the bugs in a particular program with her, put an arm about her shoulders—now there was often a feeling of conversations stopping when she rounded a corner. The new grad students found their way into the routine of the laboratory, and Ada kept a closer eye on her father, noting peculiarities in his speech or habits when they arose, attempting to classify them somehow.
In the evenings, she worked at the puzzle on the disk David had given her, marked For Ada on its case. It had turned out to be, when she’d inserted it into her computer and started it up, simply a text document with a short string of seemingly random letters.
DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ, it read.
David would not give her any clues. Together, they had been studying cryptography and cryptanalysis for the past several years—a hobby of David’s that, he said, came out of his days at Caltech, where his mentor had been a cryptanalyst during the war—and he told her this was her next assignment. “It may take you a while,” he admitted. “Don’t let it affect your other work, of course.”
While she worked, he worked: in his office, with the door now closed sometimes. She looked at the outside of it, vaguely hurt.
Then Christmas came, and with it the Christmas party that Ada always anticipated and dreaded in equal parts, for with it came outsiders.
David loved Christmas. In addition to their annual trip to New York, he insisted upon several other traditions, and balked at any suggestion of variance: after dinner on Thanksgiving he always put on the record player an album of the Trapp Family Singers performing Christmas songs from around the world, and he played this regularly until January 2, and then packed it away; then there was the Stringing of the Lights that occurred on the first Saturday of December, and which David executed with an efficiency that put the other fathers on the block to shame. In mid-December they cut down a Christmas tree at an orchard in the Berkshires, a daylong expedition that he put on the calendar with great seriousness on December 1; and after that they visited Cambridge, where Frank lived, to go with him to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant and then to Sanders Theatre to see the Christmas Revels—a sort of scholarly variety show of medieval Christmas pageantry, with a dose of druidism thrown in as well. Just the sort of thing that appealed to David and his cohort.