She looked startled, then turned her head away. She had thought about it, he saw. “The atoms in a plasma move in patterns that are big fractals of the spin-network patterns,” she said.

Sax nodded, asked more questions about that. It seemed possible to him that she would be able to help Da Vinci’s fusion group with the problems they were having engineering a lightweight fusion apparatus. “Have you ever done any engineering? Or physics?”

Affronted: “I am a physicist.”

“Well, a mathematical physicist. I was thinking of the engineering side.”

“Physics is physics.”

“True.”

Only once more did he push, and this time indirectly. “When did you first learn math?”

“My mom gave me quadratic equations at four, and all kinds of math games. She was a statistician, very keen about it all.”

“And the Dorsa Brevia schools. . . .”

She shrugged. “They were fair. Math was mostly something I did by reading, and correspondence with the department in Sabishii.”

“I see.”

And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN; about weather; about the sailboat’s ability to point to within a few degrees of the wind. And then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his walks on the peninsula’s sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit of the tundra. And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed to convince him that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was happening at the Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit this level, and then make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it out and understand it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm that was so very small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really. The fabric of reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all earlier theories, many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was inevitable. So that they could lie side by side in the grass in the sun, staring as deeply into the petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no matter what was happening at the Planck level, in the here and now the petals glowed blue in the light with a quite mysterious power to catch the eye.

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