As a child, Jill had no outward gifts to balance this deficit of poverty. She was a runt with an unremarkable face and mousy hair badly cut. Early on she decided that the best way to deal with the mockery of her peers was not to care what anyone thought. Then she learned she was gifted in certain subjects—math, for instance, and chemistry. Her teacher cautiously suggested that Jill might be able to earn a college scholarship. She grasped that lifeline and never looked back, hadn’t seen her parents since she started college, never answered her mother’s letters—tales of woe every one.

Two things Jill vowed never to do: place money on a bet and let a man into her life. Because once you hooked up with someone, by definition you could no longer call your life your own. By definition his liabilities became your liabilities. And once you’d taken a wrong turn like that you paid dearly. Even in this age of divorce, you would pay.

All her energy was focused on her career. Perhaps it was because the very idea—that Jill Talcott from Pittsville, Tennessee, might be somebody—was so absurd. Like her father, she always did have a soft spot for the long shot.

Are the people and events in our lives like pebbles? Jill wondered, watching the lake. Do they spread out the ripples of their impact, changing us in ways we could not even guess? It was not a happy thought and certainly, she admonished herself, not a very scientific one.

Frowning, she gathered pebbles on the beach and began tossing them into the water. On the surface of the lake they left rippling patterns. She toyed around idly for a few minutes, then got absorbed by it. She made piles, arranging the pebbles by size. She watched the ripples her pebbles made with ardent interest, watched multiple ripples intersect.

Crest, trough, crest, trough. Where two waves meet they form an interference pattern: crest + crest = higher crest, trough + trough = deeper trough, crest + trough canceled each other out, creating a shorter crest or shallower trough. And that new pattern went out to intersect and merge with the next and the next and the next and the next.

Two hours later, Jill was still at the beach. The wind had picked up, and the lake was getting choppy. Jill, grimy with sand and dirt, her piles of pebbles denuded, stood on the beach with very small pebbles in her hand. She tossed them in, then got down on all fours to look across the surface of the water, watched the waves intersect, ripple out, fade away.

It was getting difficult to see the ripples because of the water’s rising chop. She squinted—had the queerest sense that there was something she was not quite grasping.

Then she did see it, so obvious it blindsided her. The lake has a wave pattern of its own.

The idea floored her: the simplicity of it, the beauty of it, the way it shifted her entire worldview. It was one of those moments that a scientist might get, at best, once or twice in a lifetime, and her eyes teared up with the power of it.

The lake’s surface was a repeating choppy wave. Yes, the pebble waves interfered with one another, but they were also interfered with by the stronger wave of the lake itself.

She sat back on her heels, hands clutching at the sand beneath her. They’d been counting on the fact that the carbon atom data had been run in a vacuum. But of course, the particle accelerator was a “vacuum” only in the sense that there were no other particles in the accelerator—in other words, no other pebbles. But there was space in the accelerator, space-time, the stuff of the universe. In other words, the lake had been there.

Was space-time a mirror-smooth surface, as she’d unwittingly assumed? Or did it have a wave of its own, like the surface of Lake Washington?

What was the wave pattern of space-time itself?

3

3.1. Calder Farris

Mark Avery left four phone messages before Calder finally made himself respond. He didn’t want to visit Avery, a man rotting away with cancer, a man who’d once been the closest thing to a friend that Calder Farris had ever had. A nine-hour sigmoidoscopy would have been more inviting than a visit with old Mark now. But on the last message Avery had sounded like he was at death’s door and said he had things, important things, to pass on.

Hell and goddamn. Calder phoned and arranged a time with Avery’s wife, Cherry, to come visit.

He pulled up outside the small officer’s bungalow where Captain Avery and his family lived, dread turning to resentment, resentment sparking anger so black he ground his teeth. He made his way up the walkway, kicking a plastic PlaySkool scooter out of the way. At the door he smoothed his black trench coat in an effort to gain control before he rang the bell.

Cherry answered. Calder eyed her warily. He took his glasses off, but she didn’t even blink. Cherry had never been intimidated by his eyes, funnily enough. In fact, she seemed to know he used them deliberately and to find that pathetically amusing.

Calder couldn’t stand her.

Years ago, Mark Avery had been a bachelor. Mark had trained Calder when he’d come to the DoD, worked as his partner for about a year. They’d developed an understanding that was rare for Calder. They’d believed in the same things: in the United States of America, in military power and order, in dedicating their lives to keeping their country number one. Or so he’d thought. Maybe it had even been more than that. Maybe there had been something paternal in the older man’s affection—or maybe Calder had just imagined it.

Screw it.

Anyway, they’d spotted each other at the gym, watched games together on TV in this very house, pizza and beer, card games sometimes, shit like that.

But then Calder’s training had been over and he’d traveled a lot. He and Avery got together once in a blue moon. And one day Avery said he was getting married. Calder couldn’t fucking believe it. The man was nearly fifty and had known the girl all of three months. She was younger than Calder, ferchristssake.

Calder had tried to talk him out of it. He’d told Avery exactly what he thought, that he didn’t need a ball and chain, that he had no business marrying someone her age. Calder had only met Cherry once, but he hadn’t liked her but figured she was marrying Avery for free housing and a military pension package, and said so.

In the end, Mark had married Cherry and Calder had hardly seen him since. And Cherry must have known some of it, because she treated him pretty cool.

Yup, as far as Calder was concerned, Mark Avery’s life was over long before he’d been diagnosed with the big “C.”

Today, though, Cherry didn’t give him the Popsicle imitation. She invited him in as if he were her old pal. Her too-pretty face, the face Calder had once found such an affront to his good opinion of Mark Avery, was thin and pale and wore no makeup. A kerchief held back unwashed red hair. She looked exhausted. She looked like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe.

“He’ll be so glad you came.” Cherry smiled, gratefully. Great. If Cherry was happy to see him it had to be pretty damn intolerable.

A small body came charging out of the kitchen and smashed into her legs. Avery’s son. Calder couldn’t remember his name. He stared at the kid uneasily—red corduroy overalls and a striped T-shirt, red baby hair, sticky face.