Big piece of the puzzle, and tying up loose ends
I’ve been missing a big piece of the puzzle from FALLEN, and it was really stumping me. But I got it on Friday! Love when those breakthrough moments happen. I love when it all comes together, it’s alive, you can see the whole picture, and the story is just…THERE. What a rush! And then it just flies. I can hardly type fast enough to keep up (and I can type 120 wpm). I’ll never be a handwriter for that reason alone, I can’t handwrite with anywhere near the speed I can type. (The other reason I’ll never be a handwriter is because it takes about one page for the repetitive motion strain to cause pain. Typing is much easier on my hands, and doesn’t put me out of work the following day while I recover.)
I also have followup material from FALLEN. This wasn’t planned, but I have a subplot that’s not going to tie up in the novel, and will either spawn a novel or a novella. I’ll pitch it and see what flies. It’d be nice if a follow-up novel became St. Martin’s book #4 and I could just write them back to back without having to leave this world when I have the whole thing in my head. At the very least I’ll go from FALLEN into the proposal/pitch for the follow-up.
Which brings up the reader question, what happens if I’m told no? What about that dangling subplot? Well, I handled dangling subplot with Night Music by writing Night Rhythm and putting it up on my site as a free read. I always have that option if nothing else. (Night Rhythm is a bit too short to publish with Samhain standalone, although I suppose I can always propose that it be included with Miss Lonely Hearts as bonus material to make it more widely available.)
Anyway, sequels can get into tricky territory with contracts and so on. But as an author, we do always have the option of finishing out the story and doing something creative with it. But just because I want to write a sequel to FALLEN, and I intend to do my utmost to convince my St. Martin’s editor that it’d be a terrific idea to buy the sequel, doesn’t mean I will get a yes. Hence my thinking ahead for other options to tie off those loose threads.
Article day?
I’ve written a lot of articles and essays over the years for RWA newsletters, for my RTB columns, etc. And I was thinking that I could make good use of them by republishing them here on my website one day a week, adding new material as it comes up, and then maybe compiling them into a downloadable PDF for writers. Any preference for article day? I’m leaning towards Monday since it’s the start of the business week.
Private: Asylum
This is a straight Science Fiction short story, my contribution to Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. I’ve moved it over here from the blog to give it a permanent spot. More participating stories can be found here.
Author’s note: I’d been reading about crazy mathematicians (and there are a lot of them), and thought: what if? What if there was a special asylum full of mathematicians? What if they weren’t actually crazy? And this futuristic little story is the result.
copyright 2007 by Charlene Teglia
1,098 words
There was a new inmate.
No, Lueben corrected himself, not an inmate. Patient. That was the proper term. They were all patients here, not prisoners. They were all sick, not criminals. It was important to keep it straight in his head, or there was a real danger of using the wrong term out loud to the wrong person at the wrong time.
New patient, Lueben repeated silently as he studied the hapless man who hovered uncertainly near the sealed door. The man looked not only confused, but unwell. Thin to the point of emaciation, with a stubble of gray whiskers on his chin and lines below the watery blue eyes. Poor bastard. I wonder what he did to get sent here?
“Here” was not a pleasant place to be. Although it wasn’t entirely without compensation. Time, for one. Lars Lueben studied the newcomer, noted the weak, staggering half-steps and decided to play Welcoming Committee. Why not? He had the time.
“Welcome to the asylum,” he said in greeting, sliding a steadying hand under one frail elbow.
“Asylum?” The newcomer looked at him, questioning.
“That’s the official term,” said Lueben. “You might think, by the abundance of guards or the bullet-proof glass or the fire and blast resistant plasteel doors, that you were in a high-security prison facility for those who have proven dangerous to the equilibrium attained by the world government. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, we’re patients in an asylum.”
“Ah.” The man nodded.
“Just so. Allow me to give you the tour.” They strolled away from the door into the open rec hall. Nearby, a wild-haired man sat, alternately scribbling frantically or gnawing the end of a stylus. “That’s Henry. He’s only mildly insane.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Trying to find an original proof to the Pythagorean theorem, poor soul.”
“Pythagorean theorem?” The thin man’s sparse gray brows beetled upward in astonishment.
“Yes. You know, right angles, the hypotenuse? A sad case. It’s the most-proved theorem in existence. Trying to find an original proof.” Lueben shook his head sadly. “Come on.”
They walked on to a man who sat on the floor, eyes closed, rocking back and forth.
“Is he…?”
“Oh, no, he’s all right. Just insane,” Lueben said reassuringly. “Plays chess in his head all day. Scared the bejesus out of me the first time I saw him move. I thought he was catatonic. All of a sudden he started leaping around, shouting, Checkmate! Rather startling. Poor Ivan,” Lueben finished on a musing tone. “He was the world chess champion, you know. The world’s foremost tactical genius. Nobody here can give him a decent game, so he’s reduced to this.”
The new man’s stubbled jaw sagged. “You can’t mean—do you mean to tell me, that’s Ivan Petrovich? I thought he was dead.”
“Not at all, as you can see. But I wouldn’t try talking to him just now. He hates being interrupted.”
Further into the room, Lueben pointed to a man whose lips were moving soundlessly while he wrote a seemingly unending column of numbers, hand moving unceasingly. “There’s Johnson, another resident. Trying to calculate pi to infinity. Can’t be done, of course, that’s the whole point of infinity. But he keeps at it. He’s up to four thousand decimal points, now.”
The man’s pale eyes took on a fevered look. “Johnson. Sir Douglas Johnson? Knighted for his work in gravity, clearing up inconsistencies towards a unified field theory?”
“That is he,” agreed Lueben. “Crazy as a loon. Imagine thinking grand unification is a reachable goal. Might as well try to calculate pi to infinity.”
The man’s lips opened, closed soundlessly, opened again. “Crazy?”
“Certified. I wouldn’t presume to judge him for it, though; we are in no position to throw stones.” Lueben tugged gently, urging the man to continue on. After a moment, he did. It was a short distance to the low contoured couches that lined one wall. Lueben sat and motioned his companion to do the same. “There, now. Mind telling me what your breakthrough, er, breakdown consisted of?”
“What? Oh. No, not at all. It was the snark, you see.”
Lueben made a noncommittal sound, encouraging further explanation.
“It wasn’t originally my idea, of course. It sort of came about one night when I and my team had had a bit too much to drink. We started talking about quantum theory. Quantum tunneling, in specific. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Well, Davis, he’s —that is, he was—my head research assistant,” the man corrected himself with a pained expression, “Davis said it first. He said if we were using superconductors and supercolliders and vapor chambers and so on to catch, say, neutrinos, why not build a trap to catch the snark?”
He paused and shook his head. “He proposed the snark as a sort of interdimensional quantum tunneler. Catch one, and we might learn something the engineers could use.” His voice escalated, intensifying in remembered enthusiasm. “Think of it, the possible applications are limitless. Literally limitless. Instantaneous transportation, collision prevention. Imagine a fail-safe on every flyer. At the first collision warning, it winks through a dimensional fold.”
Lueben sat up straighter, catching the man’s excitement. “Practical application to quantum tunneling? Controlled and directed? That’s—that’s—”
“Exactly,” agreed the man. He rubbed a hand over the sparse stubble on his chin. “Well. So. I proposed to go snark-hunting, and build a trap to catch a snark.”
“Good heavens.” Lueben could scarcely breathe.
“I might have gotten away with it, but the facilities were too closely monitored to hide a secret experiment of that scale.”
“Yes, I should think so.”
“Yes.”
The two men sat together in silence for a moment.
“So that was my breakdown,” the stranger said in a soft voice. “Schizophrenia, they called it. Took me away, burned my notes. I don’t know what happened to any of the others.”
Lueben nodded in respectful silence. After a while, he asked, hardly daring to hope, “But your experiment. Did you?”
An angelic smile creased the wrinkled face, and a holy light of transfiguration gleamed in the pale eyes. “Did I? Oh, yes. I caught a snark.”
Excitement rose. “You did. And did you—”
“Learn anything useful?” The man nodded, still smiling. In an instant, he winked out of existence, leaving nothing but the smile hanging in the air behind him. The disembodied lips moved in a final sentence.
“Lewis Carroll must have stumbled onto it, too. In theory. Never had the equipment to test it out. Fine mathematician.”
The smile widened. And then vanished altogether.
People in your neighborhood Part 2
A family of eagles is nesting right by the Sol Duc, where we cross the bridge on our walks. There are three of them.
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