Chapter 14 The Albatross #6
Putting the voltmeter down, Laurel sighs. “I know how this is going to sound. But can you try to trust me when I say that it’s for your own good?”
“I can try,” Gloria mutters.
They separate to pursue their typical tasks.
Gloria records data in the cave, and Laurel observes the tree.
Caterpillars and songbirds have made homes in its branches.
Squirrels seize fallen acorns. Laurel sweats despite the breeze.
Michigan has reached the peak of summer: the air is a soupy murk, the sun so warm it makes her want to close her eyes.
After lunch, she sits down to rest, leaning her head against the trunk.
Laurel drifts through the trance that precedes sleep.
She sees boxes open out of boxes and a skull shaped like a cave.
The cave is empty of water, empty of thought.
Bone holds the skull open, as the basin holds the Arc.
Without the Arc, the basin is dormant. Inanimate, the skull waits.
The members of a playgroup stand around a parachute.
Then the tide changes. Water flows into the cave, and neutrinos fill the Arc. The parachute becomes a dome; a current sparks in the skull. From the soil issues something invisible but sensed: not a sight, not a sound—
It’s a scent.
“Gloria…?”
Laurel’s voice issues in a warble. When she opens her eyes, Gloria is several feet away, eating Cheez-Its and pretending not to hear.
“Gloria!”
“What,” says Gloria, flatly.
“Odor. Chemical messaging,” Laurel says. “Volatile signals in fungi and plants: that’s our analogy for consciousness.”
Chewing, Gloria turns. “But we don’t work on volatiles.”
All around them is a frothy, humming buzz: insects weave between flowers, and animals rustle through grass. Laurel pushes herself into a seated position.
“I know someone who does.”
—
There are things that pain Laurel about every age, too. One day, Silas can’t remember how to tie his shoes. Tantrums become more frequent. His mouth scrunches to the right when he registers some absence—that a cubbyhole of previously stored information is empty.
What saves her is his ignorance. Immaturing is natural here.
Sometimes it seems that Silas is simply going deeper into his own consciousness—and into the world.
He loses language, not observation. When he is three, they have the same conversations they did five years earlier, but the tenor is different.
“Tree?” he asks, on a walk.
“Tree,” says Laurel, confirming.
“Tree,” he says, observing.
There is a long pause. Silas steps toward the trunk.
“Tree,” says Silas. This time, he seems to speak to it directly.
He still loves puddles, music, hats. When Clare babysits, she puts on one of the new classical composers, something zippy with strings, and they dance.
IceCube hasn’t found strange oscillation patterns. To widen the search, they’ve partnered with another detector: the Super-Kamiokande in Japan.
“Why does that name sound familiar?” asks Laurel.
“Because it was pictured on the other Eli’s book cover. He’s worked with them,” Eli says. “It’s kind of like he led me here.”
The observatory—a steel tank larger than the Statue of Liberty—lies three thousand feet beneath Mount Ikeno. The tank is filled with water. Eleven thousand golden light bulbs line the walls. To make repairs, physicists row through the water in boats.
“When a neutrino collides with water,” Eli explains to Laurel, “it makes a flash. The human eye can’t see it. But these bulbs could catch a lit match from the moon.”
Super-K is even more sensitive than IceCube. It could be their last chance.
There are two tracks in Eli’s mind: the one that follows Laurel and Silas, and the one that searches madly for some crucial piece of data.
He begins to stay up at night again. He and Laurel kiss less, touch less.
Periodically he travels to Japan. Laurel doesn’t tell him she suspects that they won’t escape in time.
She questions this choice constantly. But she also remembers how Eli responded when she shared her doubts before.
Most of all, she still wants there to be a chance she’s wrong.
Eli returns from his most recent trip dejected. The next morning, they bring Silas to the park.
“How do they live like this?” Eli asks, looking at other families.
“I suppose they could say the same about us,” says Laurel. “An inevitable march toward old age? They might think we have nothing to look forward to.”
Eli hasn’t shaved in months. His beard is as long as Eli Two’s.
“Wisdom,” he says. “We look forward to wisdom.”
Laurel watches Silas giggle on the grass. “Maybe they look forward to innocence.”
His happiness requires so little. The sight of Laurel or Eli is enough. So is a favorite song, swimming at the pool, ice cream in a cone.
“This is fun!” he cries, jumping up and down on the bed.
—
On Halloween, Maisie becomes pregnant. The day before, during a phone call, Laurel heard Hazel crying. Now Hazel rests in Maisie’s womb.
Three years earlier, Noah and Maisie lost Frankie.
Laurel couldn’t bear to ask how it happened.
Instead, she brought meals and carried out errands.
She would have done this out of love alone, but she also thought of it as penance.
For shying away from the story—for being too scared to ask questions.
This time, she steels herself. Laurel will have to know these answers soon enough. If Maisie wants to share, she’ll listen. When she visits, though, Maisie only clings to her in silence.
By spring, Maisie is no longer visibly pregnant.
Laurel wonders how many people are carrying children just as imperceptibly.
Those whose pregnancies are obvious receive special treatment, but the slant is somber.
When a pregnant woman rides the bus, other passengers treat her with tense respect, sometimes a hush of pity.
After the woman departs, there is often a relieved adjustment.
In January, Noah calls to tell Laurel that Hazel is gone.
Her heartbeat had been undetectable for several days, but Maisie’s urine still showed hCG until that morning.
Laurel drives over. In the bedroom, Maisie is weeping.
Laurel climbs under the covers and holds her, crying, too.
She thinks of the way Hazel looked on at her birthday party—like a fairy-tale girl with a wizened old woman inside.
And how absurd it is, the bargain of life: that we should be gifted love while guaranteed loss, love’s tax.
—
At three, Silas loves the neighborhood playground. Once, while pushing him on the swings, Laurel notices a teenage girl.
The girl watches Laurel and Silas from a bench. Her red hair looks uncombed, and her face is torqued by longing.
“Such a difficult age,” she says.
Something in her affect makes Laurel uneasy.
“He’s a beautiful boy,” the girl adds. “He looks like mine did. Can I hold him?”
“Oh,” says Laurel, surprised. She’ll have to say no: the request is inappropriate. Yet something makes her pause. It is the memory of her own yearning—how, after Silas died, she could not bear the sight of women with sons.
An older man hurries down the hill. He wears house slippers and a bathrobe, as though he left in too much of a hurry to change.
“I’m so sorry,” the man says to Laurel. He takes the arm of the redhead and leads her away.
Laurel is disturbed by her own confusion.
Did she almost hand her child to a stranger?
Silas fights her when she lifts him from the swings.
Wrestling him into his coat, Laurel begins to cry—panicked tears of frustration, tears she remembers from another lifetime, when a different Silas threw a tantrum in a public place.
But his sweetness frequently disarms her. On his second birthday, Laurel and Eli give him a toy kitchen. Tearing the wrapping paper, he says, “Wow! Oh, wow!” As they sing happy birthday, tears come to his eyes.
They hold his party in the toddler section of the pool. Clare comes early to help set up. Just before the guests arrive, Silas’s mood reverses without warning.
“Are you two today?” asks Laurel encouragingly.
He glares at her in his party hat. “No!”
“That about sums up where we’re at,” Laurel tells Clare. She’s been nervous about the party—Silas has entered an unfortunate hitting stage—but the pool distracts him. His school friends, Victor and Sabrina, attend with their parents. The group gets along well, and only one child has an outburst.
“Well done,” says Victor’s mother, squeezing Laurel’s hand. “Birthdays are never easy.”
—
Work is a distraction. After her epiphany about volatile signaling, Laurel planned to invite Tess Two to collaborate remotely.
Then the botany department advertised an opening.
Laurel noticed a familiar name among the applicants: Teresa Torrez, currently in Utrecht, now seeking to move closer to family.
Tess wins the job easily. When she arrives in Madison, Laurel treats her to cheese curds and pitches the cave experiment. Tess needs no convincing. Afterward, Laurel gives her a campus tour. She takes care to mention that Tuesdays are horror movie night at the student union.
Tess touches Laurel’s arm. “I love horror movies.”
In Science Hall, they turn an unused office into a situation room. Gloria creates a map of the inside of the cave. They affix it to a bulletin board and chart circuits with pushpins. Tess carts boxes of ORBs into the office for storage.
“Can we see them?” Gloria asks.
The ORBs are nestled in protective padding, like ornaments. Each is roughly the size of a softball.
“It’s basically an electronic nose,” says Tess, passing one around for inspection.
“Air enters a sorting tube, and a sensor interprets volatile molecules. The results are translated into color. If the volatiles come mainly from fungi, the gas in the ORB turns green. If plants are the primary source, it turns red.”
The latest model was engineered to measure concentration, too: the color glows brighter as communication increases.