Few thoughts of his failed to reach his lips. If there are two sorts of people in the world, Tom Schwoerin is of the other sort. He opened his mouth and closed it again and had the grace to look embarrassed, because there was something true about him also. “Well, I hope you were able to beat it out of her.” Tom spun in his swivel chair and faced her. “What is it? Youve been cursing in tongues all day. There is something true about Sharon Nagy in that one half-missed detail: that she uses a pen and not a pencil. She glared at Tom, who muttered over his keyboard. Evidently God did not intend for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against white bone-china teacups. But the world shattered into a kaleidoscope, and for a moment she sat overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups connected by a meta-algebra. She heard Tom smack his PC terminal and she screwed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. Consider Quasimodo, or Beautys Beast.Īn alien voice intruded into her world. Perhaps it lacked only the right beholding to fall into beauty.

Dimensions are quicksilver slippy-looked at sideways, they would vanish.Īnd yet, she sensed a pattern lurking beneath the chaos and she stalked it as a cat might-in stealthy half-steps and never quite straightforward. Space and time spiral off in curious, fractal vortices, in directions that have no name. The geodesics are warped and twisted things. It is not a beautiful thing, this world of hers. It may not be networked to the wider world, but Sharon Nagy creates her own worlds, strange and inaccessible, among which lies one at the very edges of cosmology. Sharon uses a computer, too, but its an organic one that she keeps between her ears.

She gazes in Toms direction, but she is looking on some inner vision, so in a way she too has her back turned. Sharon lounges on the pillow sofa on the other side of the room, notebook open, surrounded by wadded-up balls of paper and half-finished cups of herbal tea, thinking about whatever it is that theoretical physicists think about. He has his back to the room, which means to Sharon. There is Tom hunched over the computer by the window, tracking down obscure references over the Net.

That is easy enough today, when the world lies literally at our very fingertips but it can be a trap, too, for what we need may lie just beyond the tips of our fingers. During summer sessions, Sharon and Tom both did their research from home.

Eifelheim by michael flynn