Chapter 2: The Song
Mickey leaned against the railing at the edge of the steamboat and surveyed the docks. Today's cargo was live. Mickey wasn't fond of cattle, and gave a slight frown as the cows were brought across the gangplank. It was the smell mostly. If the steamboat journey didn't take so long Mickey would have the chance to wash it out of his clothes, but it would be a day or two before the next port. He prepared himself mentally to smell of dung and musk. The cows stared back dully.
It took about an hour before the last of the cargo was loaded on and the gangplank was raised. A light rain started to fall, just as the steamboat began to move. In the distance, where the docks met the land, Mickey began to make out a human figure. The figure caught his attention for two reasons. First, she appeared to be sprinting at a remarkable speed, and second, she appeared to be doing so with much difficulty. Her flowing dress was impractical both for the rainy weather and for the breakneck speed at which she ran, and her arms were folded tightly across her chest. Mickey narrowed his eyes. His heart nearly stopped when he realized who it was.
Minnie carried no umbrella and wore no raincoat. Having kicked off her shoes to run faster, her bare feet splashed down into newly formed puddles. All she could do to keep the papers in her hands free from the rain was to clutch them close to her, giving her run an awkward gait as her body leaned left and right. Mickey quickly ran through the possibilities. If Minnie was here, it could only mean something terribly good or terribly bad. Mickey didn't have a lot of relatives left, so a death in the family wasn't likely. Somehow the alternative scared him more. Maybe she had finally done it.
By the time Minnie reached the boat it had already begun to move. The gap between the dock and the edge of the deck was about a meter, but the dock was significantly lower. Mickey ran to the edge. Minnie ran alongside the boat, scanning its length quickly until she spotted Mickey. Her face lit up when she saw him. Keeping the papers pressed against her chest with one arm, she pointed to them frantically with her other hand.
"I've got it!" She shouted. "It's here!"
A rush of emotion flooded over Mickey. Fear and hope and love all at once. The emotions mixed into a powerful melange and his hands trembled. He knew what the next step was. He had to talk to Minnie. Remembering himself, Mickey looked around to make sure that his colleagues were out of sight. He couldn't leave the steamboat without losing his job, but maybe he could get Minnie on the boat. It would be hard to explain, but this was worth it. This couldn't wait.
Mickey looked desperately around for something that could bridge the gap. The gangplank wouldn't work while the boat was moving, and he didn't know if Minnie had enough strength to pull herself up the length of the boat if he threw her a line. There had to be another way. His eyes caught the crane and he grimaced. It would have to do. The crane was used to move heavy objects on and off of the steamboat, and strictly speaking, Mickey wasn't trained to use it. Still, there were only about thirty seconds left until the boat was past the dock, so it was now or never.
Mickey rushed to the crane control and pulled a few levers, figuring out their functions by trial and error. The mechanical arm began to move, unfolding and reaching out across the bow. Minnie immediately caught on and upped her pace until she was ahead of the boat. The arm rotated until it was over the dock.
"Climb on!" shouted Mickey.
Mickey kept the pincer claw of the crane half closed, allowing Minnie to plant her feet on the top of it. Her free arm wrapped around the steel wire attached to the claw. Mickey pulled another lever and the crane began to lift. As delicately as he could without ever having used it before, Mickey guided the crane arm back onto the ship. Minnie stepped off. The two fell into each other's arms without hesitation. Mickey pulled back as he realized he was creasing the papers. Minnie stepped under an overhang and flattened the sheets of music against the wall of the cabin building. The couple's eyes fixated on the sheets and then met.
"So that's it then?" Mickey asked, gesturing to the music.
Minnie smiled in a way Mickey had rarely ever seen. "That's it. It's my masterpiece."
The music sheets were fairly unassuming. The notes didn't look especially complicated, although the key and the time signature were a bit strange. It seemed only to have a single melody part, written for only a single instrument. At the top it read "Turkey in the Straw (Hey, hey)." Mickey stared at it in awe, trying to come to grips with what this meant.
"If that's really it," he said slowly, "then everything is about to change."
Minerva Laplace was born in 1905 to Jean and Marie Laplace. Her mother died of complications from childbirth. Her father was as devoted to her as he was to his work, which was to say, too much. Five year old Minnie frequently spent dinnertime answering questions about Euclad's postulates while she poked piles of canned vegetables with a fork. She joked sometimes that math was her native language, but to her father's dismay, there was never any love for it. Even as it became clear that Minnie was at least as much of a genius as her father, she preferred to spend her days doing things Jean Laplace considered frivolous.
When Minnie was twelve, she told her father she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up. When her father scoffed and called her dream silly, she turned bright red and vowed that she would never do another math problem until her dream was realized. This worked well enough to get her father to pay for dance lessons, but by the time she was thirteen it became clear that she wasn't cut out for dance. Oddly shaped bones and maladroit footwork caused her to give it up, much to her father's satisfaction.
This satisfaction didn't last long. Minnie set her sights on painting and music and quickly became accomplished at both. Eventually she attended university, studying both art and music theory. It was there that she met Mickey, and took a liking to his unique way of thinking. His outside was a carefully constructed facade, but Minnie saw right through it from the start. Beneath his jaded shell, Mickey cared deeply about the world, and was ready to sacrifice anything to make it a better place.
It was summer of 1924 when Mickey had decided to marry his beloved. He remembered the day he fell in love with her distinctly, and associated it with the smell of paint and dust. Mickey and Minnie sat on the wooden floor of Minnie's studio cross legged. The studio was an old attic lit only by a few small windows. There were no chairs, and the only objects of note were a few easels and some piles of art supplies. The morning sun trickled in.
"You're watching the painting?" asked Minnie, her chin pressed against a violin.
"Yes," said Mickey.
She began to play. The painting, which already evoked a great deal of motion, seemed to writhe ever faster as a brisk violin melody filled the air. It depicted a ship at sea, tossed about by a turbulent ocean. Rays of sunlight broke through the black clouds in scattered beams, causing the ship to be only half obscured by darkness. The brushstrokes of the painting were oddly comforting despite the desperate situation they portrayed. If the ship were to sink, at least it would sink amidst the pleasing curves of sapphire waves.
Mickey felt enraptured by the tune and was tempted to look over at Minnie, but as promised, kept his eyes on the painting. The song brought to life a feeling that Mickey had forgotten how to feel. It was equal parts beauty, awe, and tragedy. It was the song of eating the sweetest fruit ever tasted, knowing it was the last of its kind. Tears welled in Mickey's eyes and his hairs stood on end. Minnie finished playing and lifted her bow from the strings. She set the instrument carefully down beside her.
"That was incredible," said Mickey.
"I know," said Minnie. There was no pride in her voice, only a statement of fact. "But here's what's been on my mind. Why do we have music? Or art of any kind?"
"Well, you know," said Mickey, "It's beautiful. It makes life worth living."
"Sure," said Minnie, "But I mean on a deeper level than that. What makes the sound waves you just heard or the brush strokes you just stared at special? Why not something like this?"
Minnie punctuated this last statement by picking up the violin and slashing the bow across it, creating a discordant hiss. Mickey cringed at the sound.
"I don't know," said Mickey. "I guess I never really thought about it."
"It's something of a mystery," continued Minnie. "Something about certain patterns causes an effect on people. Did you notice anything happen to you while you were listening?"
"The hairs on my arm stood up," said Mickey.
"Right," said Minnie. "Goosebumps. Some people call it frisson. Art is just information, but somehow taking in that information caused a physiological change in your body. Only very specific art does it, and not every person gets the same effect."
"What are you getting at?" asked Mickey.
"I have a theory."
Mickey leaned forward, intrigued. His stomach grumbled loudly. Minnie smiled gently. "I'll tell you about it over lunch?"
Mickey and Minnie sat down outside a quaint cafe on the edge of town. Minnie ordered her third coffee of the day. As they settled in and began to eat, Minnie continued her explanation.
"Things like music don't make sense because we can't see the full picture," she said through a mouthful of sandwich. "There's an aspect of reality that's hidden from us."
"What makes you say that?" asked Mickey. "Maybe some things just aren't supposed to make sense. Maybe us mortals weren't meant to understand things like that."
"They said the same thing about physics," said Minnie. "Before Ptolemie mapped the planets and the stars, people thought the heavens were unknowable. Now we can predict the motions of celestial bodies almost perfectly. All you need to know is the set of starting parameters and you can derive the laws of motion with nothing more than a telescope."
Mickey took a sip of chilled gourd soup and furrowed his brow. "But if it was so easy for physicists to figure out how planets move, why can't their physics explain music?"
"Because they don't have the starting parameters. None of our observations make sense because we're looking in the wrong direction."
"So what's the right direction?"
Minnie paused for a moment, taking a pensive sip of coffee. "We live in a three dimensional world, right?"
"I think so," said Mickey, trying to remember the few lessons of geometry he had suffered through. "Things can be measured by length, height, and depth?"
"Exactly. But what if there was a fourth dimension?"
Mickey vaguely remembered something from a talk by a visiting physicist he had once attended while drunk. "Isn't the fourth dimension time?"
"No," said Minnie, "Time is the first temporal dimension. It only goes in one direction. I'm talking about a fourth spatial dimension."
"So you mean that in addition to length, height, and depth, we would have a fourth thing to measure the shape of an object? What would that even be?"
"I call it spectra. And I think you've actually seen it before."
Mickey's spoon abruptly stopped before reaching his mouth. "Really? When?"
"What did you notice about the painting earlier when I started to play the violin?"
"It's hard to describe, but it seemed a little like it was moving. I mean obviously it looked like it was standing still, but it felt like it was moving."
Minnie smiled cryptically.
"You knew I was going to say that? How?"
"Because I designed the painting and the song together to cause that effect."
"Like an optical illusion?"
"Like the opposite of an optical illusion. An optical reality. You caught a glimpse of what reality really looks like, but only for a split second, and only a small slice of it. You getting goosebumps is your body's reaction to experiencing something it's not equipped to understand."
"That's amazing," said Mickey, "but how do you know your theory is right?"
"Because the math works out. I've been studying all the times I've ever gotten goosebumps from music and trying to see if there are any patterns. It turns out there are, and they map perfectly to fourth dimensional math."
"That's a pretty big discovery," said Mickey. "Have you published it yet?"
Mickey knew immediately that he had asked a dangerous question by Minnie's uncomfortable expression. Her eyes darted left and right about the coffee shop. She wore an expression that Mickey knew all too well. It was the guarded fear of someone with politically dangerous ideas.
"Let's talk about something else," Minnie said.
Mickey nodded. Minnie had never struck him as a communist, but it seemed like the more time he spent with her, the more layers he discovered. Lost and adrift in the world and utterly without purpose, Mickey found himself smiling whenever Minnie talked. Her words didn't just inspire a sense of purpose, but a sense of majesty in the beauty of creation. They were two souls set apart from the masses for opposite reasons. Where the fascists saw a perfect world, the Whitegloves saw a problem with its solution being revolution. Mickey felt connected to neither faction, seeing only an unsolvable problem. Minnie, on the other hand, seemed to see solutions where there were no problems. Her dreams transcended the narrow minded logistical truths that Mickey had immersed himself in.
After spending the remainder of lunch talking about things like the weather and the food, the two hurried back to the studio in the attic. Minnie seemed as eager to explain as Mickey was to hear the explanation.
"I'm not a Whiteglove," announced Minnie, when they had retreated to the safety of seclusion. "But that doesn't mean I disagree with their ideals."
"That doesn't sound far off from my thoughts on the matter," remarked Mickey.
"I know exactly what would happen if I published these results, and it wouldn't be good. The regime would offer me a choice. I would either work for them, or I'd be considered a traitor."
"Work for them?" said Mickey. "In my experience the regime has no interest in art or music."
"That's because they haven't seen what it can do yet."
Mickey let the words sink in, and silence filled the air. After a moment, he spoke. "What can it do?"
Minnie smiled in a way that was almost devious. "Even I don't know. But I know it'll be big. Every physics discovery upsets the status quo. And this one is bigger than any we've ever discovered before. Once I get it right, it'll be bigger than radio, automobiles, or gunpowder. It'll let us do things everyone thought were impossible."
Mickey thought for a moment. "Why not publish it anonymously? Wouldn't that solve your problem?"
"No," said Minnie. "My problem is that the regime sees everything as a weapon. If they can find a way to turn this into one, they'll kill, imprison, or hire anyone who uses it. I can't let that happen. Knowledge is the birthright of all humanity."
There were stars in her eyes. Mickey smiled. "So I take it you have a different plan?"
"I do," said Minnie. "Right now it's mostly theory. I can get glimpses into the spectra, but it's like trying to experience the ocean with a teaspoon of water. If I can just get the patterns to converge a little more, I'll be able to dive in and swim. And so will anyone else if they have access to my art."
"So you're gonna give it away?"
"To anyone except the regime. If I'm right about what it can do, it'll be the start of a new era. The future will be unrecognizable."
Mickey's heart melted and tears welled up in his eyes. Minnie's ability to envision things he had never dreamed of made his fruitless quest of overthrowing the regime seem petty and unimportant.
"I can't wait," said Mickey.
The following two years seemed to pass at breakneck speed whenever they were together, and abysmally slowly when Mickey was at work. Initially, Minnie's progress was rapid, and as soon as Mickey got home, she chattered excitedly about how close she was.
"There's a critical point, you see. Once I cross that threshold, everything will flip and the theoretical will become practical. The spark will be a fire."
"What's the threshold?"
"Seventy two percent alignment."
"And what are you at now?"
"Sixty nine."
The excitement of the early stages didn't last though. The last couple percentage points turned out to be orders of magnitude harder to achieve. On top of that, there was money. In university, Minnie had paid for half of her expenses with her father's money and the other half by selling her artwork. But now she was focused on a singular task. There was no time to sell artwork. Everything had to be focused on her research, and even the experiments in painting that might have fetched a price would have cost precious time to sell. So Mickey suffered through his work and funded everything.
The hours were long for both of them, but the moments they spent after work were precious. Most days Minnie was so exhausted from her efforts that she wanted to talk about anything besides her progress. Mickey took to describing the scenes he saw along the Sarahana river: birds and flowers and the occasional fish. It was mindless, but it took her thoughts away from the grind. One night, curled up together under the sheets in the midst of a particularly cold December, Minnie confessed her feelings of hopelessness.
"I'm not sure I'll ever get it," said Minnie softly. "It took me six months to get to seventy one percent. And now it's been a year with no progress. This last percentage point may actually be impossible."
"Don't think that way," said Mickey. "You taught me not to think like that. It's just the tiredness talking."
"But what if I'm really just wasting my time? What if I'm wasting both our lives with this?"
"Don't imagine that the future will be just like the present," said Mickey. "It might seem impossible now, but things change. I changed when I met you. The world will change when the work is done. I don't care if it takes our whole lives, I'll wait."
The two held each other closer. There was a sweet silence.
"What will it be like?" asked Mickey. "When it's done?"
Minnie thought for a bit. "It'll be like we were blind before. It'll be like-"
She stopped, and reached out from the covers to grab a thick stack of black music sheets from the bedside table.
"You see this sheet?" she said, holding up the top leaflet.
Mickey squinted in the darkness. "Yeah."
"This is how much of reality we can see now."
She tossed the stack of papers back onto the nightstand, where it landed with a thud. It was a thick enough stack that she could barely fit her hand around it. "That's how much we'll be able to see when it's ready."
Even as he comforted his wife, Mickey himself stopped believing that any breakthroughs were on the horizon. He had no intention of giving up, but the giddiness of the early progress had faded and he stopped waking up with the expectation that today would be the day. So on that fateful afternoon, when the day finally came, Mickey was overwhelmed.
"I knew you could do it," he said, gazing into Minnie's eyes. "I just can't believe it's happening now!"
The two began to grin, and then burst into a sort of manic laughter. The sort of pained laughter of relief that comes after a long hardship. When it faded to a giggle, Minnie held the sheets out.
"Are you ready to see what we've been working for?"
"I am," said Mickey firmly. "But there's something I want to do first."
The two embraced, and shared a long kiss. For once in almost two years of marriage, they let themselves enjoy a moment without concern for the past or the future. Minnie relaxed and loosened her hand's grip ever so slightly. After a moment, Mickey was disturbed from his loving embrace by a crunching sound. Opening his eyes and backing up, he saw what had happened. In the brief instant that the sheets had slipped from her fingers, a cow had poked its head over the enclosure and eaten the papers whole.