Feigenbaum number - short story

"Behold! Human beings living in an subterraneous den ... Like ourselves, they diocese only their own shadows, or the shadows of individual another, which the fire cast in a winding directions on the opposite walls of the cave." - Plato, The Republic

I rose from the bed, leaving Diane sprawled across the rumpl sheets, smiling, lipstick smeared and large belly sweaty. She said, "Wow"

"Wow yourself," I said and move rounded to the mirror. Behind me the other woman rose spiritual from the bed and gibbeted smiling, to the window.

Diane, said, "Come back to bed, Jack."

"Can't. I have to advance Student appointment."

"so what's new?"

In the mirror I saw her organ of sights narrow, her mouth tighten. The other woman revolveed from the window, laughing, individual slim graceful arm pushing back a tendril of chestnut hair.

Diane skinned her brown hair back from her face. "Is it too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to ask, Jack, honey, that just one time after we make love you don't pass rushing off like there's a three-alarm fire? Just once?"

I didn't answer.

"I mean, by what mode do you think that makes me feel? Slam-bam-thank-you, ma'am. We have an actual relationship here, we've been going without for three months, it doesn't appear to be a lot to ask that after we make have affection for you don't just -"

I didn't interrupt. I couldn't The dizziness was stalwart this time; soon the nausea would tread in the steps of Sex did that. The intensity. Diane ranted, jerking herself to a kneeling position upon the bed, framed by lumpy maroon window curtains make opened a crack to a neighbor's peeling frame house and weedy garden. Across the latitude the other Diane stood framed by means of crimson silk draperies opened a crack to a mellowed-wood cottage riotous with climbing rose She blew me a lighthearted kiss. Her organ of visions glowed with understanding.

The nausea came.

"- can't look to understand how it makes me have feeling to be treated like -"

I clutched the cutting side of the dresser, which was the pair a scratched pressed-board "production" and a polished cherrywood lowboy sum of two units perfume bottles floated in brow of me: yellow plastic spraybottle and clean-lined swollen glass. I squeezed my organ of visions shut. The ghostly Diane disappeared in the act of sauntering, slim and assured, toward the bathroom.

"- don't flat really look at me, not when we make be fond of or -"

Eyes shut, I grop for the bedroom door.

"Jack!"

I slammed the doors, one as well as the other of them, and left the apartment before Diane could come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind With her sloppy anger, her overweight nakedness, her completely justified weeping.

Outside was better. I herd my Escort to campus. The other car, the consummately engineered driving machine with the glossy and balanced lines, shimmered in and without around me, but the vertigo didn't get back I'd never gotten very intense about cars, and above the years I'd learned to handle the double state of anything that wasn't too intense. The quiescence I avoided. Mostly.

The Aaron Fielding Faculty Office Building jutt boxlike three stories from the asphalt parking apportionment and it blended its three floors harmoniously with a depressed hillside whose wooded lines were repeated in horizontal stretches of brick and copse The poster-cluttered lobby was filled of hurried students trying to diocese harried advisers, and it was a marble atrium where scholars talked eagerly about the mind of man. I walked down the corridor toward my cubicle, individual of a row allotted to teaching assistants and post-docs.

But Dr Frances Schraeder's door was render free of access and I couldn't resist.

She sat at her terminal, working, and when I knocked upon the doorjamb (scarred metal, of the soul graceful molding), she looked up and smiled. "Jack! tend hitherward look at this!"

I came in, with for a like reason much relief my eyes prickled. The material Fran's lengthy agespotted fingers were held poised above her keyboard, and the ideal Fran's lengthy age-spotted fingers echoed them. The ideal Fran's white hair was fuller on the other hand no whiter, and both were wound in simple short caps. The material Fran wore glasses, on the contrary both Frans' bright blue organ of sights a little sunken, shone with the same alert tranquility.

She was the sole person I'd ever seen who came shut up to matching what she should have been.

"This is the latest batch of phase space diagrams," Fran said. "The computer just finished them - I haven't smooth printed them yet."

I crouched beside her to compeer at the terminal.

"Don't direct the eye any more disorganized to me than the last bunch"

"Nor to me either, unfortunately. Same elderly same old." She laughed: in chaos theory, there is no same elderly same old. The phase space diagrams were infinitely compound never repeating, without control.

But not completely The mastery was there, not readily visible, a lock opener we just didn't recognize with the mathematics we had. Yet

An ideal no individual had seen.

"I keep thinking that your young mind will pick up something I've missed," Fran said. "I'll make you a transcript of these. Plus, Pyotr Solenski has published a certain quantity of new work in Berlin that I think you should take a gaze at. I downloaded it from the toil and e-mailed you."

I nodded, on the contrary didn't answer. For the first time today, calm flowed [i]or[/i] part of to the other me, soothing me.

Calm.

Rightness.

Numbers.

Fran had done serviceable if undistinguished, work in untainted mathematics all her life. For the last hardly any years she - and I, as her graduate learner - had worked in the precise and austere world of iterated function theory, where the flow of a given equation is recycl as the starting value of the nearest repetition of the same equation. If you do that, the issues are predictable: the sequences will approach on a given set of numbers. No matter what initial value you stopper into the equation, with enough iterations you extreme point up at the same figures, called attractors. each equation can generate a station of attractors, which iterations approach on like homing pigeons flying back to their nests