The Uber-Unicorn

by Sam Kean

Table of Contents
Part 1 and part 2
appear in this issue.

conclusion

He had tried to seduce her as a means to an end, but in going through the motions of courting her, he found that it had worked too well on both of them. She, too, missed her mother tongue, and they spent hours cooing at each other in their native languages, each blissfully oblivious of the what the other said.

They made love, and after this a sudden twinge of conscience always stopped Julian from asking her to come to his office and view his research. Whole weeks passed like this, and soon every time he saw her, he felt nothing but these twinges — his two great loves, physics and Maria Bellini, wrestling inside him for control. Finally, she had cut the Gordian knot. Intrigued by his secrecy, she asked for an assignation in his office.

During the minute and eighteen seconds it took Maria Bellini to absorb Dante’s 99 cantos (poetry necessarily taking longer than the equivalent length of prose) she had been transformed into something quite ugly. Small, soft Maria Bellini had turned rigid. The off/on cycling in the brain had induced a tic in her jaw and her nostrils flared in and out like something rabid. She bit so hard on her lips, he was afraid she would draw blood from them.

Reduced to a mere instrument, she had almost slumped out of her chair, as if under a seizure, and he had to support her in his arms like a lover. The scientist in him, as well as the human, was relieved to see the patches on her temples had picked up everything, and there would be no need for a second run.

Not that she would have submitted again. In fury, she lapsed into Italian, but he had known exactly what she meant —”What did that, that have to do with great and lovely Dante? Who are you, you fat beast, you hairy, ugly pig with your stomach?” She kicked at him, connecting twice and began to scream and slap the computer monitor with her open palm.

Panicked — though burly, he was in many ways a child — Julian had done the one thing he had vowed never, never to do: he tried to show her what the data were for. He tried to elucidate all the beauty of the universe that it contained. But though she calmed down, Maria Bellini wouldn’t listen. She lit another cigarette, which repulsed him, and accused him of reciting all that bello, bello Dante just to sleep with her. He responded that this was unjust — he’d memorized the sonorous Italian incidentally, not with an end in mind.

Yet he could not help himself. His eyes kept flitting to the chart on the back of the door. He could hear the data being processed by the computer — it hummed and whirred — and finally, he could endure it no more. He brought Maria Bellini over to the new periodic table, and explained to her what it was all for.

“You are perfect, both you and it. What you give me will make my results perfect.”

With a great yell, Maria Bellini slashed at the chart with both hands. The patches where Julian had applied paste thickly to the back stuck fast to the wood; the rest tore free beneath Maria Bellini’s fashionably pink fingernails. She looked as if she were going to eat the carcass of it, and the next thing Julian remembered, he was physically heaving her into the hallway.

She cracked into the wall opposite his door, but leapt back like a lion, furious from a crouch. He shut the door just in time to feel her thump against it, and though staggered, he managed to lock it. His last memory was of her two blue eyes, blue eyes that had drifted and rolled grotesquely while absorbing Dante, suddenly turning black and cinching him with hate.

By the time the computer had crunched and compiled the data, it was two o’clock on Saturday morning. The numbers were exactly what he could have predicted: twelve near-perfect matches, differing only at the far fringes, and one wildcard. He went to his chart on the door to compare the number that Dante had revealed to the rest: 174.13847634... 1.00270503785...12.4584431937...

With so few points, he had not been able to discern a pattern in the graph at the bottom of the chart: it looked buckshot against a target, but lacking the center to cluster around that buckshot would have had. This new point gave him an idea: it was farther up, and he traced his finger from point to point, starting low and zigzagging upward to the highest. It hinted at a parabola.

He unlocked the door and scanned the hallway for Maria Bellini, intending to celebrate this discovery with her. He was surprised not to find her. He shut the door and locked it automatically, but thought he caught a hint of cigarette smoke in the air that had come in from the hallway. He opened and checked again, but saw only the same cold and unlit hall.

“Maria Bellini?” He lowered his voice and repeated her name, but no answer came. It wasn’t clear if he was imagining the odor or not. He had succeeded in emptying the entire night, and had nothing now to do but work on his particles. His door remained unlocked, and it dampened what should have been a great moment.

But Julian was a resilient man. Just before sunrise, he withdrew a calligraphic pen from a desk drawer, and — in an ornate Cyrillic he had perfected out of respect for his mother language, during dead moments while the computer analyzed data — he etched onto the top of his chart, his monument, the following words:

“When the thirteenth is fully understood, we will finally be able to reconcile human beings with the physical world. And what we will find is that far from being at odds, they are the same. They have the same underlying structure and meaning — they tap into the same source and should therefore should flow into and support one another. With the thirteenth particle, I have discovered a sixth and more fundamental sense: a combination of reason and revelation that will allow us to read the universe as easily as we do Dostoyevski.” He never thought to run this statement through his reading apparatus.

Fueled by pronouncements like this, years passed quickly and productively for Julian. He continued to bring in textual experts, but only coldly and formally. There would be no reprise of Maria Bellini. They arrived, intimidated and unsure of what would was going to happen to them. They left buzzed and bewildered. A few retired after their encounter with his apparatus.

Late one night, the great scientist woke up sharply and sat up. He had just had made a theoretical breakthrough that afternoon, during an analysis of Machiavelli’s The Prince. While the school’s new professor of Italian rested on Julian’s floor with an icepack over his eyes, Julian had given a shout that made the small, swarthy man wince. It was the first book known to give a thirteenth ratio that was a negative number!

“This is nyet over,” he had said to himself while lying down that night. “My work is nyet over.”

When the embolism struck, Julian woke to a searing pain behind his eyes. It was so severe that he was blinded. He tried to get out of bed and call for help, but found that he legs were not responding as they should have, and he teetered and crashed into a night stand. The agony lasted for an eternity, two entire minutes — enough time, had he thought of it, to read any work of literature he had in his store.

At last the pain released him. There was a second of bliss — a flood of endorphins in his brain — before he succumbed. The police officer who found him sprawled on the floor, his face with a post-coital look of release, said he looked like nothing else in the world but a circus bear.

When his fellow expatriate, a Russian janitor, cleaned out Julian’s office, the last thing he did was peel down the mended chart on the back of the door. Everything of interest — all his early notebooks on theoretical physics — Julian had long since sold for money, and the janitor’s instructions were to pitch the rest.

On the chart, all hope of a parabola had been lost — it had resumed the shape of buckshot — but Julian had shifted his hopes into chaos mathematics, still believing that he could impose order. He had penned in the Machiavelli point only days before. The Russian janitor undid it all with a razor blade. It came free bit by bit, with the sheaves that Maria Bellini had torn coming off separately from the rest.

While he scraped, Mikalov studied the pieces that came off: odd irrational numbers attached to various author’s name. Like Julian before his conversion, the man had heard of the great master authors but had not read them. And though delighted to find a beautifully-lettered Cyrillic passage across the top, the message itself puzzled him. He was the only other human being to ever read the words there; and he could not for the life of him make any sense of them.

* * *

I’d heard a few bangs while I was near the end, but I was too involved in the essay to take notice.

When I finished it, I looked up and leaned back. I needed a moment of quiet to ponder this. Had he planned to write this ahead of time? I could feel the story working on me like someone digging into me with a fingernail. It made me almost angry: I wanted to run out of the room and find this kid and demand to know why he’d written such a thing.

But the scene in front of my eyes was too incongruent to let me spend time reflecting. It shocked me from my meditations, and I never got back to the story, at least not in the same state of absorption. Like we all do, I had to give it up to deal with the crisis at hand.

“Hey, hey, wait! No conferring with each other,” I yelled.

Startled as I was, the 300 students were even more so. The test should have ended five minutes ago — actually twenty — but when no one told the students to stop, none of them did. The banging I heard had been a few trained students snapping their foldable desks into place, assuming time had run out; but when they saw me reading, the instinct to clump and whisper was too strong. They kneeled on the floor and scribbled in hurried footnotes.

“Come on, make your way down,” I directed them. “No clumping in the aisles, come on.”

They were naturally reluctant to part with the essays, and I tried to put them at ease. “Make a neat pile, thank you. I look forward to reading these.” I could just imagine Doug Shaw’s eyebrows creasing.

After a minute, it became clear that one huddle off to the side was not breaking up as it should have. Like a mineral deposit, it remained intact despite the stream of students around it. They assumed that with all the others that I wouldn’t notice and ignored my directives that this was no big deal, just a test.

When nearly everyone else had passed by, I cleared my throat loudly, twice. They started to stir, but there was no sign of breaking off. I could hear them whispering now, and caught a few words — definitely literature related. I had to follow through on my threat to go over.

When I was three steps from them — I had put up a hand to clasp one young man on the shoulder — the wall suddenly split. Out of the middle of the ring stepped Lizbeth Makens.

“It’s okay, Professor Scott,” she said. “I had a quick question, something so incidental that I assumed it would not be a problem to consult with them. I couldn’t remember if Dostoyevsky was spelled with an ‘i’ at the end or a ‘y’.” She laughed lightly as if she couldn’t believe how silly she was.

I blushed, as did everyone else, but Lizbeth never flinched. None of her fellow conspirators made eye contact with me as they slipped by to hand in their essays. I could feel a rush of air behind me as they opened the doors to escape.

“Scott?” she asked when we were alone, “Is it y or i?”

“It can be either,” I mumbled. “Modern texts prefer y, but older books use i... like Hindu, spelled with a double oo. Or how Thoreau spelled Eskimo: E-s-k-i-m-e-a-u-x. It can be amusing...” I trailed off.

“That’s fascinating,” she said, nodding. I felt stupid. “You know a lot of arcane facts like that, don’t you? Well, I used the i with Dostoyeski. I hope that’s satisfactory.”

She walked past me.

“That’s great, really great,” I said. I was speaking to her back by now. She dropped three full blue books onto the pile, which she tidied into a stack, and sashayed out the door. As she passed through, she turned and smiled at me.

“I’m really looking forward to reading it,” I called out.

Lizbeth passed, of course. She had done exactly what was expected of her at every step, and her grade is a perfect reflection of that. Based on the strength of her last few sentences — which included two references that clarified her argument, without which the essay would not have tied together — she got a B. I saw her on campus a few times after that, but I always ducked away from her.

In fact, everyone in the class passed, except for one. I couldn’t take the risk, not with tenure review coming up. I couldn’t even give him fifty percent: it’s a smallish campus, and gossip is notorious inside departments. Word would have gotten out if I had given the unicorn anything but exactly zero. I had no choice. Unlike Lizbeth, he had failed, failed spectacularly.