He smiled again, demurely. “Okay, Mr. Engstrand. We will talk about Lack. What do you want to know?”
“How. Why. You said you’d solve it. You said you’d give me Alice back.”
“Sit down, my dear fellow. You are making me nervous. I found out what I could from Lack. Lack is nothing. I am working on a larger problem now. I am sorry if I was no help with your Professor Alice. I forgot.”
“That’s your big theory? ‘Lack is nothing’?”
He looked at me warily. “Okay, Mr. Engstrand. Sit down. You have an advantage over me: You have had a drink, and I have not. Now I will have a drink too. You want a drink? Have a drink with me, Mr. Engstrand.”
I sat on the chair. Braxia went into the kitchen. I heard him easing ice cubes out of a tray. A minute later he reappeared with a pair of tall glasses, filled with orange juice.
“Vodka, you know, has the fewest impurities,” he said. “And some vitamin C. Good for you.”
I took a glass. He guzzled, I sipped.
“Okay,” he said, smacking his lips. “A drink is good, for big talking. To talk to you about Lack I first have to talk to you about observer-triggered reality. Okay?”
I nodded.
“This is my life’s work, Mr. Engstrand. Ah, I wish you spoke Italian. It’s like this. Consciousness creates reality. Only when there is a mind to consider the world is there a world. Nothing before, except potential. Potential this, potential that. The creation event, the big bang—it was the creation of enormous potential, nothing more.”
I was already lost. “You’re saying there’s no world where there isn’t a mentality to consider a world.”
“Yes.”
“There’s just a gap,” I suggested. “A lack.”
“Hah! Very good. Yes. A lack, exactly. A potential event horizon. Everything is only potential until consciousness wakes up and says, let me have a look. Take for example the big bang. We explore the history of the creation of our universe, so the big bang becomes real. But only because we investigate. Another example: There are subatomic particles as far as we are willing to look. We create them. Consciousness writes reality, in any direction it looks—past, future, big, small. Wherever we look we find reality forming in response.”
“Why?”
“Ah, why. This is my life’s work, Mr. Engstrand. I think there is a principle of conservation of reality. Reality is unwilling to fully exist without an observer. It can’t be bothered. Why should it?”
“I can relate to that,” I said.
“So, it’s no simple thing, then, the creation of a universe. If consciousness is required to confirm the new reality, you have to provide the consciousness too. You can’t make just a whole new universe full of reality, without making the commitment to look at it. You’ve done only half the job. That, my dear fellow, was Soft’s mistake.”
“Lack, you mean.”
“Lack. My theory is the first good explanation for Lack. Listen. Soft creates a new universe, of potential reality. But no intelligence to fill it up. Fine, it collapses into nonreality. Perhaps someday consciousness will evolve, like here, and it will become real. A long slow road.”
“Every universe has to wait for observers to evolve, you’re saying.”
“That’s right. Except for Soft’s. Soft’s had a shortcut. Because it was created in Soft’s lab. It is attached, it finds out, to a gigantic reservoir of nearby consciousness. Us. It thinks, I could exist if I hold on to this, you see? So it refuses to part with the mother universe. It is drawn to us, moth-to-flame-like. That is why it would not detach. That is how Lack was formed.”
“So Lack is hungry for meaning. Awareness. It’s his only hope.”
“You could say that. He could wait for evolution, but that is a long time. Some more?” He pointed at his empty glass.
I looked down. My glass was empty too. Braxia took them and went into the kitchen. In another minute he was back with more.
“But what about the effects?” I said. “Lack’s personality. His choosiness.”
“Ah.” He smiled into his glass.
“What do you mean, ah?”
“I lied to you just now, my dear fellow.”
“Lied?”
“I did not forget about your friend Alice. She is central to my problems. She is the reason I have to pack up my team and—” He moved his arms, imitating airplane takeoff.
“What do you mean?” Was he about to reveal his own love for Alice? A passion that was driving him from the continent?
“It is hard to explain. Another theory.”
“Tell me.”
“Lack, in his hunger for consciousness, grabbed on too strong to one that was near by. Professor Alice, I think, was the one. Lack borrows her opinions and tastes. They make him imbalanced.”
“What?”
He sighed and closed his eyes, as if he had to remember to be patient with me. “You see, Lack should be impartially hungry. But no. Instead he is making his stupid selections. Based on Professor Coombs, I think. Very unfortunate.”
“You’re saying Lack’s personality is borrowed from Alice?”
“Yes.”
“But then—”
Braxia wouldn’t meet my eye. He drank instead. “You see why I lied to you, my dear fellow.”
It was too much for me. My responses came in a crazy jumble. “I still don’t understand why you have to leave,” I said.
“This Lack is tainted by the persona he has adopted. Therefore he is useless. Professor Coombs’ tastes are too limiting. Especially one in particular.”
“Which one?”
“Against science. Against research, scientists, physics. I think she picked it up from you, and passed it on to Lack. You have this element in your personality, you will have to admit. And Alice adopted your prejudice, despite herself. Because she was so close to you. So now, Lack resists all attempts.”
I was stupefied.
“So now I go back to Pisa.” Braxia raised his drink, like he was making a toast. “I will make my own Lack. If I impart it with biases, they will be my own. Against the social sciences, perhaps. And American wines. Then we will see what can be done. Then we will accomplish some physics.”
“You’re going to repeat Soft’s experiment?”
“Sure, why not? I think this Lack will close up soon, anyway. It can’t stay open forever.”
“It can’t?”
“No. Violates the laws of physics. Hah!”
Braxia found this hilarious. He laughed obnoxiously. As he drank his face turned red, dispelling my black- and-white newsreel respect for him. I nursed my drink.
I wanted to deflate his smugness, but he was the only one who’d even claimed to have solved Lack. It was nothing to sneeze at. He was so sure of himself that he was leaving. Now Lack was no international prize, just a pothole malformed by subjectivity.
“Then Alice is in love with a reflection of herself,” I said. “She’s Narcissus.”
“Sure,” said Braxia. “But who isn’t?”
“No, it’s more than that,” I said. “She was drawn to Lack from the beginning. So it’s a combination of things. Her obsession with the void.”
“Maybe. Here.” Braxia jumped up, retrieved the vodka from the kitchen, and sloshed it into my glass undiluted. It combined with the residue of orange juice to form a blend resembling Tang, the drink of the astronauts.
“So Lack only takes what Alice likes,” I said, still working it out in my simpleton way.
