White Light (Axoplasm Books) by Rucker Rudy

Author:Rucker, Rudy [Rucker, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780762441419
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2001-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

No. 15

High Tea

When we were half-way through the thickness of Cimön, Cantor stopped by a round door set into the ceiling. The door was massive with a dial set into it. It looked like a safe.

He gestured to the dial. “You are a mathematician, Dr. Rayman. Perhaps you can open the lock?”

The dial had only ten markings, labelled zero through nine. I jumped to the conclusion that the combination would be a string of alef-null digits, the decimal expansion of some real number. But which real number?

I reached up and spun the dial slowly clockwise, pressing one hand against the door. I felt a tumbler fall at 3. I reversed the direction and inched the dial counterclockwise. Another tumbler clicked at 1. There is only one familiar real number that starts with a three and a one. If my guess was right the rest would be easy.

“How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.” I recited this slowly, moving the dial back and forth. The phrase is a well-known mnemonic for remembering the first fifteen digits of pi. You list the number of letters in each word to get 3.14159265358979. A tumbler clicked with each digit. It was pi for sure. I went into a speed-up.

An easy way to get the full decimal expansion of pi is to sum up a special infinite series: 4/1 − 4/3 + 4/5 − 4/7 + 4/9 − 4/11 +… I started adding and dialing in the digits as they developed. It took me a couple of minutes and my neck got stiff from staring up at the dial.

Finally I finished. There was a satisfying thok inside the heavy door. Another free game. I pushed and the door swung open. My arms were tired from reaching up, and I let them fall.

“Very good,” Cantor said. “It’s a thousand meters up.” I peered into the dim shaft. I could make out metal rungs on the side of a body-sized tube. I wondered how we would be able to make the climb. A thousand meters straight up is no joke for a man Cantor’s age. I said something to this effect, but he assured me that as the gravity shifted the climb would get easier.

If Franx was impressed by my feat he hid it pretty well. While Cantor and I talked, the beetle scrambled up my back and through the door – as if I were a turkey-bone leaning against a garbage can. Cantor took my arm.

“Where did he latch onto you?”

“Franx?” I said, stepping back with an upward glance. I could hear him scuttling away some fifty feet up. He was still my only friend here – even though he had been acting so strangely. “He’s from a place called Praha. We hooked up at Hilbert’s Hotel and climbed to epsilon-zero together. I breathed in some fuzzweed there, whited out through Dreamland and regained form at the Library. Meanwhile Franx kept flying up Mount On. He saw the One, merged in, and then used the Reflection Principle to get to alef-one.

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