Some of it was on the record. She hadn’t even recognized the terms mathematicians used to describe Cornelius’s academic achievement – evidently it covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distribution of prime numbers – anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.
But he had always been – well, odd.
His gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its rightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.
As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance.
Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age, a prospect which must have terrified Taine, so that he thought he was working against time.
Or maybe there was a darker explanation, Emma’s e-therapists speculated. It wasn’t unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.
Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn’t seem to have worked.
The anecdotes of Cornelius’s breakdown were fragmentary.
At first he was just highly aware, watchful, insomniac. Then he began to see patterns in the world around him – the cracks in the sidewalk, telephone numbers, the static of dead television screens. He said he was on the verge of deep cosmic insights, available only to him –
‘Who says all this?’
‘His colleagues. His doctors’ case notes, later. You see the pattern, Malenfant? Everything got twisted around. It was as if his faith in the rationality and order of the universe had turned against him, becoming twisted and dysfunctional.’
‘Yeah. Right. And envy and peer pressure and all that good stuff had nothing to do with it.’
‘Malenfant, on his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.’
After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma’s data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time. When he re-emerged, it wasn’t to go back to Princeton but to become a founding board member of Eschatology, Inc.
And here was Emma now, with Malenfant, in the orderly office of this apparently calm, rational, highly intelligent man. Talking about the end of the world.
She whispered urgently, ‘Don’t you get it, Malenfant? Here’s a guy who tells us he sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out – a guy who believes he can predict the end of humanity.’ A guy who seemed on the point of inducing Malenfant to turn aside his own gigantic projects to follow his insanity. ‘Are you listening?’
Malenfant touched her arm. ‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But –’
‘But what?’
‘What if it’s true? Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he’s right? What then?’ His eyes were alive, excited.
Emma watched the children in the Park.
Cornelius returned and invited them to sit once more. He had brought a fresh chilled beer for Malenfant and a coffee for Emma: a decent latte in a china cup, smelling as if it had been freshly brewed and poured by a human hand. She was impressed, as was, no doubt, the intention.
Cornelius sat down. He coughed. ‘Now comes the part you may find hard to believe.’
Malenfant barked laughter. ‘Harder than the death of mankind in two hundred years? Are you for real?’
Cornelius said, with a nod to Emma, ‘Here’s a little more dubious logic for you. Suppose, in the next few decades, humans – our descendants – do find a way to avoid the catastrophe. A way for us to continue, into the indefinite future.’
‘That’s impossible, if your arguments are correct.’
‘No. Merely highly unlikely. But in that case – and knowing the hugeness of the catastrophe to come – if they did find a way, what might our descendants try to do?’
Malenfant frowned. ‘You’re losing me.’
Cornelius smiled. ‘They would surely try to send us a message.’
Emma closed her eyes. The madness deepens, she thought.
‘Woah.’ Malenfant held up his hands. ‘You’re talking about sending a message back in time?’
Cornelius went on, ‘And the most logical thing for us to do would be to make every effort to detect that message. Wouldn’t it? Because it would be the most important message ever received. The future of the species would depend on it.’
‘Time paradoxes,’ whispered Emma. ‘I always hated stories about time paradoxes.’
Malenfant sat back. Suddenly, to Emma, he looked much older than his fifty years. ‘Jesus. What a day. And this is what you want me for? To build you a radio that will pick up the future?’
‘Perhaps the future is already calling. All we have to do is try, any which way. They’re our descendants. They know we are trying. They even know how we are trying. And so they can target us. Or will. Our language is a little limited here … You are unique, Malenfant. You have the resources and the vision to carry this through. Destiny awaits you.’
Malenfant turned to Emma. She shook her head at him. We ought to get out of here. He looked bemused.
He turned back to Cornelius. ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘How many balls were there in that damn box?’
But Cornelius would only smile.
Reid Malenfant:
Afterwards, they shared a cab to the airport.
‘…Remember those arguments we used to have?’
He smiled. ‘Which arguments in particular?’
‘About whether to have kids.’
‘Yeah. We agreed our position, didn’t we? If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.’
‘Right now,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad ambition. And if we did have kids, we might be able to figure it out better.’
‘Figure out what?’
She waved a hand at the New York afternoon. ‘The future. Time and space. Doom soon. I think I’m in some kind of shock, Malenfant.’
‘Me too –’
‘But I think if I had kids I’d understand better. Because those future people who will never exist, except as Cornelius’s statistical phantoms, would have been my children. As it is, they have nothing to do with me. To them I’m just a – a bubble that burst, utterly irrelevant, far upstream. So their struggles don’t mean anything. We don’t mean anything. All our struggles, the way we loved each other and fell out with each other and fought like hell. Our atom of love. None of it matters. Because we’re transient. We’ll vanish, like bubbles, like shadows, like ripples on a pond.’
‘We do matter. You do. Our relationship does, even if it is –’
‘Self-contained? Sealed off?’
‘You aren’t irrelevant to me, Emma. And my life, what I’ve achieved, means a lot to me … But that’s me sublimating. That’s what you diagnosed years ago, isn’t it?’
‘I