The Gates (2009) (27 page)

“Well,” Nurd continued, “what’s in those pools is remarkably similar to what makes this car go. Hell, Wormwood, is our oyster.”

“What’s an oyster?”

Nurd, who didn’t know either, but had seen the phrase “The world is your oyster” in the car showroom and had rather liked the sound of it, began to reconsider his decision not to hit Wormwood quite so often.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He took a paper bag from his pocket. The bag contained the last of the jelly beans that Samuel had given to him. Nurd had been saving them, but now he offered one to Wormwood and took the final sweetie for himself.

“To Samuel,” he said, and Wormwood, who had heard so much about the boy from Nurd, echoed his master.

“To Samuel.”

The multiverse was unfathomably huge, thought Nurd, but it was still small enough to allow two strangers like Samuel and himself to find each other and become friends.

Together, Nurd and Wormwood drove off, the car growing smaller and smaller, disappearing into the distance, until all that was left to indicate that anyone had ever been there was a throne, a scepter, and an old, rusty crown …

I
WOULD LIKE TO THANK
Alistair and Cameron Ridyard, who were the first two readers of this book. Graham Glusman, and Nicholas and Barney Mays, also came forward with kind words and encouragement at a very early stage. I’m grateful to you all.

Dr. Colm Stephens, administrator of the School of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, very generously agreed to read this manuscript, and offered advice and clarification. In the interests of fiction I was forced to ignore some of it, and for that I apologize deeply. His input, patience, and expertise were greatly appreciated, and any errors are entirely my own. Thanks also to Sally-Anne Fisher, the communications officer at TCD, for her assistance.

I seem to have read a great many books and articles during the writing of this novel, but among the most useful were
Black Holes, Wormholes & Time Machines
by Jim Al-Khalili (Taylor & Francis, 1999);
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
by Marcus Chown (Faber and Faber, 2007); and
Parallel Worlds
by Michio Kaku (Penguin, 2005).

Thanks to Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton, and Emily Bestler at Atria Books, who I am lucky enough to have as editors;
to all of those who work with them, particularly their respective assistants, Swati Gamble and Laura Stern; to Darley Anderson and his staff, without whom my odd little books would not have found homes; and to steve Fisher, for always thinking visually.

Finally, love and thanks to Jennie, as ever, for putting up with me.

1.
Scientists call it the “singularity.” People who are religious might call it the mote in God’s eye. Some scientists will say you can’t believe in the singularity and the idea of a god, or gods. Some religious people will try to tell you the same thing. Still, you can believe in the singularity
and
a god, if you like. It’s entirely up to you. One requires evidence, the other faith. They’re not the same thing, but as long as you don’t get the two mixed up, then everything should be fine.

2.
In fact, about 1 percent of the static that sometimes appears on your television set is a relic of the Big Bang and, if your eyes were sensitive to microwave light instead of just visible light, then the sky at night would appear white instead of black, because it continues to glow from the heat of the Big Bang. Oh, and because atoms are so small, and are constantly recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang “Blue Suede Shoes.”

3.
And even all that stuff added together still amounts to much less than 1 percent of not very much at all, since more than 99 percent of the volume of ordinary matter is empty space. If we could get rid of all the empty space in the atoms of our bodies, the whole of humanity could be squeezed into a matchbox, with room left over for most of the animal kingdom too. Mind you, there would be nobody left to look after the matchbox.

4.
Anyway, the scientists figured, if the end of the world did happen, there wouldn’t be anybody left to blame them. There would probably be just enough time for someone to say, “Hey, you said it wouldn’t cause the end of—” before there was a bit of a bang, and then silence. Scientists, while very intelligent, don’t always think things through. Take, for example, the first caveman who found a nice rock, tied it to a stick with a piece of vine, and thought, “Hmm, I’ve just invented a Thing for Banging Other Things into Things With. I feel certain that nobody will use this to hit someone over the head with instead.” Which someone promptly did. In fact, they probably hit
him
with it so that they could steal it. This is how we end up with nuclear weapons, and scientists claiming that they’d only set out to invent something that steamed radishes.

5.
Whenever someone uses the word “glitch,” which means a fault of some kind in a system, you should immediately be suspicious, because it means that they don’t know what it is. A technician who uses the term “glitch” is like a doctor who tells you you’re sufferering from a “thingy,” except the doctor won’t tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.

6.
Malevolence,
for those of you who were off “sick” from school that day, means
hatred,
but hatred of a very vicious, evil kind. Incidentally, when you put inverted commas around a word in this way, as I just did around the word “sick,” it means that you don’t really believe that the word in question is true. In this case, I know that you weren’t really sick that day; you just felt like having a morning off to watch children’s television in your pajamas. Hence “sick,” instead of, well, sick. If you really want to annoy someone, you can make little inverted commas by holding up two fingers of each hand and twitching them gently, as though you’re tickling an invisible elf under the armpits. For example, when your mother calls you for dinner, and dinner turns out to be boiled fish and broccoli, you can say to her, “Well, I’ll just eat my ‘dinner,’ then,” and do the little fingers sign. She’ll love it. Seriously. I can hear her laughing already.

7.
This is similar to the old problem about whether or not a tree falling in a forest makes any noise if there is nobody there to hear it. This, of course, assumes that the only creatures worth being concerned about when it comes to falling trees are human beings, and ignores the plight of small birds, assorted rodents, and rabbits who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and find a tree landing on their heads.

In the eighteenth century, a man named Bishop Berkeley claimed that objects only exist because people are there to see them. This led a lot of scientists to laugh at Bishop Berkeley and his ideas, because they found them silly. But according to quantum theory, which is the very advanced branch of physics involving atoms, parallel universes, and other such matters, Bishop Berkeley may have had a point. Quantum theory suggests that the tree exists in all possible states at the same time: burned, sawdust, fallen, or in the shape of a small wooden duck that quacks as it’s pulled along. You don’t know what state it’s in until you observe it. In other words, you can’t separate the observer from the thing being observed.

8.
It was St. Thomas Aquinas, a most learned man who died in 1274, who was supposed to have suggested that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact he didn’t, although he spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not angels had bodies (he seemed to think that they didn’t), and how many of them there might be up in heaven (quite a lot, he concluded). The problem with St. Thomas Aquinas was that he liked arguing with himself, and it’s very hard to nail down exactly what he thought about anything at all. Still, the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is probably of interest mainly to philosophers and, one presumes, dancing angels, since the last thing an angel doing the foxtrot wants to worry about is how crowded the pin is getting, and the possibility of falling off the edge and doing himself an injury.

9.
Actually, this is not entirely true. It may well be the case that one cannot prove the existence of a nine-eyed, multitentacled pink monster named Herbert, but that does not mean that, somewhere in the universe, there is not a nine-eyed multitentacled pink monster named Herbert wondering why nobody writes to him. Just because he hasn’t been seen doesn’t mean that he isn’t out there. This is known as an
inductive argument.
But the argument is probable, not definite. If there’s actually a pretty good chance he exists, there’s at least as good a chance that he doesn’t exist. So you can prove a negative, at least as much as you can prove anything at all.

In addition, again according to quantum theory, there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how strange, may occur, so there is a probability, however small, that Herbert may exist after all.

Still, it’s a good argument with which to confuse schoolteachers and parents, and on that basis alone Samuel is to be applauded.

10.
A deity, pronounced “day-it-tee” is a kind of god. There are good deities, and bad deities. Nurd was a bad deity, but in general none of them are to be trusted. The playwright William Shakespeare wrote, in
King Lear,
that “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Nasty lot, deities. Don’t say that you haven’t learned something new by reading this page.

11.
There was a demon for that feeling too: Ulp, the Demon of Things That Go Round for Slightly Too Long, with additional responsibility for the Smell of Cotton Candy When you’re Not Feeling Yourself, and the Lingering Odor of Small Children Being Unwell.

12.
It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.

13.
It is not possible to flush someone to China. Or Australia. Well, not unless they’re already there. It is not a good idea, though, to point this out to someone who is threatening to flush you to China or Australia, as there is a good chance that they will try it anyway just to prove you wrong.

14.
As you can see from his picture, Einstein didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not all of the time. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them seriously to begin with.

15.
In
Alice Through the Looking Glass,
the book by Lewis Carroll, the looking glass is, in effect, a wormhole. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician, and was aware of the theory of wormholes. He liked injecting puzzles into his math classes. One of his most famous goes as follows: A cup contains 50 spoonfuls of brandy, and another contains 50 spoonfuls of water. A spoonful of brandy is taken from the first cup and added to the second cup. Then a spoonful of that mixture is taken from the second cup and mixed into the first. Is there more or less brandy in the second cup than there is water in the first cup? If you’d like to know the answer—and, I warn you, it will make your head ache more than drinking all of the brandy would—it’s at the end of this chapter …
*

*
Okay, back to Lewis Carroll’s brandy and water problem. Mathematically speaking, the answer is that there will be just as much brandy in the water as there is water in the brandy, so both mixtures will be the same. But—and this is where your head may start to ache—when equal quantities of water and alcohol are mixed, the sum of them is more compact than their parts because the brandy penetrates the spaces between the water molecules, and the water penetrates the spaces between the brandy molecules, a bit like the way two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together so that they occupy less space than if you just laid the same pieces side by side. In other words, the mixture becomes more concentrated, so if you add 50 spoonfuls of water and 50 spoonfuls of brandy, you actually end up with about 98 spoonfuls of the mixture in total. Adding a spoonful of brandy to 50 spoonfuls of water will give you less than 51 spoonfuls of the mixture, because, like we said earlier, it’s more concentrated. If you take a spoonful from
that
mixture, it will leave less than 50 spoonfuls in the cup. Then, if you add that spoonful from the concentrated mixture to the cup of brandy, it means that there’s more brandy in the brandy cup than there is more water in the water cup. I warned you …

16.
The artist Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512. He had to use scaffolding to do it, but because the ceiling was so high he couldn’t build the scaffolding from the floor up, so instead he made a special flat wooden platform that hung from bolts beside the windows. Painting the ceiling was a very uncomfortable business, as you can probably imagine, but it’s a myth that Michelangelo had to lie flat on his back to do it. Instead he stood upright, with his head bent back, for four years. By the end of it, he was so sore that he wrote a poem about the experience:

I’VE grown a goiter by dwelling in this den—
As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
Or in what other land they hap to be—
Which drives the belly close beneath the chin: