The Infinite Library (50 page)

A postscript appeared at the end of this text that was addressed to me specifically:

Gimaldi:

In the book that names us both, we are both named exactly 416 times each (or, if you prefer, sixteen times the number of letters in the alphabet).

Where the artist and the scientist meet in the actual

For in truth, painters, even when they use the greatest ingenuity in attempting to portray sirens and satyrs in bizarre and extraordinary ways, nevertheless cannot give them wholly new shapes and natures, but only invent some particular mixture composed of parts and various animals.

-René Descartes, Med. 1

L
eopold
regarded his canvas carefully, observing how tightly its composite parts, its interwoven and interlaced stitches formed the unitary screen of white. But it was, upon closer inspection, marked with very tiny peaks and valleys which were designed to capture and snag paint from a moving brush. Leopold rolled the once finely tipped brush in his hand, its hairs a bit frazzled and hard on the edges from an infinity of washings and dryings. His eyes followed up the hairs to where the aluminum pinched the wand and beyond to where the pointed tip of the wand lodged into his teeth. Beside him, on a roughshod table, was a book by Leibniz that he found by chance in a recycle box, a collection of metaphysical writings some student got fed up with. One could tell that Leopold had been reading it, for he had a section bookmarked on one idea in particular: that of each singular substance expressing every possible event that could ever be visited upon it. Yes, Leopold would paint today with the concept of infinity as his inspirational source, even if he hadn't the cognitive apparatus to comprehend this concept, how it differed in mathematics to philosophy. Enamoured already as he was by deserts and uncountable nouns, such concepts found likely fundament in him. There was a sense of brazenness and urgency to his creative fervour on this day, and he felt feverishly animated for the first time in a while. Whether this was to be attributed to his strange dream, he could not say, nor was he going to risk offending what was sparking his sudden output with any ungrateful questioning. He was determined to ride out what short burst of creativity had been mysteriously gifted unto him.

Backward-playing voices in his mind went into a growling crescendo as he worked, a garbled harmony of terrifying alien throat-songs. Thinking this to be a strange but pardonable part of the creative surge he was experiencing, he thrust it brutally upon the canvas. He felt as though what he was creating was enough to snag the eye of any onlooker, capture the gaze and rub it raw against the infernal texture brought about in the marriage between canvas and brush. What he desired, fully, was that the work upon completion would cause a viewer to convulse spasmodically like an electrocuted pig. The more excited he became, the faster his brush made its transit between canvas and palette – all until it all suddenly died out: the surge, the voices, the manic spark that so brazenly prompted him to slash with conviction upon the once blank space. He threw the impotent brush across the room, resulting in an unsatisfying click against the wall, the sound of small and hollow wood against the solid impenetrability of the wall. Leopold put his hands against the floor and could now hear the return of more internally derived voices; this time, he felt them as they seemed to course up through his bent arms, his sunken chest, his bleary head. And he knew: it would take much more to bring his creation to term, perhaps even an unthinkable sacrifice. He began to pound against the floor, laughing in erratic fits. Falling silent again, he left his apartment in its pitiful state, tubes of half spent oils curling with the appearance of grubs gone dry in the sun and turning metallic. The door was left carelessly open as he passed to the outside. The streets seemed to quietly hum his name. He needed no canvas, for his art was twofold: the best paintings were hung in the gallery of his mind, and his body was the greatest exhibit on earth. This feeling of personal largesse was all that stood between him and the acceptance of the fact that he had given up, that the inspiration that had possessed him had, in its fickle way, abandoned him once again.

Meanwhile, Dr Aymer was back in his laboratory, overseeing a demonstration on dysgenesis by one of his graduate students. They were both tackling a most strange anomaly: the progeny of the fruit flies,
Drosophila melanogaster
, were born without wings. The experiment, kept under the most strict of controls, was not supposed to produce such bizarre genetic results. But this was not the first instance of such anomalous events in the labs on campus. Dr Aymer suspected that someone was tampering with either the equipment. However, since the last instance and other such strange occurrences that went on throughout
that week, the Faculty of Science had been prompted by no mean number of complaints to take action. Soon, the entire floor was under video surveillance. Those charged with the task of reviewing the tapes found no evidence of tampering or sabotage of any kind.

Dr Aymer felt a strange guilt concerning these anomalous events. Dr Aymer would assume the source of the anomaly could have been due to a wide variety of possible factors: improper procedures, fudged results,
inaccurate measurement readings, faulty electronic apparatus, unsterilized equipment, tampering, a mistake in calculation, or an observational error. Of the million and one things that could go wrong in an experiment, Dr Aymer knew that anomalies were simply errors, and one had only to investigate all possible sources of error in procedural or equipment aspects of the experiment - even if it meant that Dr Aymer himself would have to delegate an outside research group to repeat the experiment. Unlike the
unscientific hypothesis that anomalies represented supernatural
intervention, Dr Aymer knew there to be scientific reasons for all unexplained phenomena lodged beneath any mystery. Dr Aymer, not out of an implicit distrust of his students' honesty or ability, personally conducted the repetition of the experiment that yielded the wingless flies. He, however, needed to locate the rational solution, for there were many who were seduced by some tendency to declare the event miraculous. Dr Aymer had no patience for miracles, and believed that an economy of thought would eventually lead to a safe and rational explanation.

Dr Aymer placed two wild types of
Drosophila
in a tube, about twelve flies in total, and kept them in a separate storage unit with a padlock only he could unlock. By the next evening, seeing as
Drosophila
attain sexual maturity within twenty-four hours, the flies would have mated. Surely enough, Dr Aymer removed the tube from the unity and came across the same anomaly. He carefully analyzed the DNA of both parent and offspring, and found no reason why the latter would have exhibited this genetic flaw. The flies merely wriggled pointlessly before him, almost taunting him with their impossibility. Dr Aymer replaced the tube in the unit to give the wingless flies a chance to mate. What he found two days later was even more troubling. There was a hundred percent rate of newborn flies that lacked pigment in their eyes. Usually, the wild types had brownish-red eyes, yet the progeny had white eyes. He left the flies to mate again, and puzzled over the results and rechecked the results for two more days. By week's end, the next generation was not only wingless and white-eyed, but had no legs. He could not rationally explain why this had happened, and he watched as the flies without wings or legs writhed impotently at the bottom of the small tube, now incapable without assistance to mate let alone feed themselves. He reasoned that there was a problem with this batch, and so he ordered more flies from the same supplier. The results remained as anomalous as before, so he then ordered from another supplier, yet there again was no change. Meanwhile, other students who were working on similar projects complained of the anomaly. But Dr Aymer was determined to solve the puzzle - to which he reasoned that perhaps the laboratory environment itself was tainted, perhaps irradiated - and so set about to breed the flies naturally, i.e., leaving a banana peel to rot in the open air of his home as to invite the domestic and local variety of
Drosophila
. Again, the results were the same.

As quickly as these flies could breed, these results were spreading quickly across the world in isolated labs. A friend and colleague of Dr Aymer's in Stockholm had complained of the same problem. Genetics periodicals became swamped with articles on this finding from all over, and it soon became the most talked about issue in genetic science. No one could adequately explain the phenomena, but everyone had their theories, and not all of them relied on core scientific principles. Some alarmists eager to turn the event into a crisis for which they could be named heralds postulated that the fundamental principles of genetics were, in light of these findings, in need of a serious reassessment. Others stated that there was a hidden evolutionary force that was somehow causing
Drosophila melanogaster
to suicide itself, some hidden mechanism of epigenetics that was causing a process of mass extinction. Of these theories, the most far-fetched claimed that this phenomena could be a new explanation for the dinosaur extinction, UFO interference, and a variety of other crackpot speculations. It seemed as if, with the lack of concrete evidence, the anomaly was dragging in scientists from diverse disciplines to dredge up strange theories to cover this heterogeneous situation. They all banded together in marshaling whatever hasty theory they could to their aid, for there was a lot to lose in the failure to explain. The person who could explain it best, regardless if it was true, would win.