Isaac smiled, exhausted. Godspit, he realized suddenly, I’m doing rather a good job of this . . . Ten years of research have improved my teaching . . . Yagharek was watching him carefully.

“I . . . understand . . .” the garuda finally said.

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s more, old son, so gird your loins. UFT’s not very accepted as a theory, you know. It’s probably about the status of the Fractured Land Hypothesis, if that means anything to you.” Yagharek nodded. “Fine, you know what I mean, then. Just about respectable, but a bit crackpot. However, to shred the last vestiges of credibility I might have been able to muster, I subscribe to a minority view among UFT theorists. That’s over the nature of the forces under investigation.

“I’ll try and keep this simple.” Isaac squeezed his eyes closed for a minute and gathered his thoughts. “Right. The question is whether it’s pathological for a dropped egg to fall.”

He paused and let the image hang for a minute.

“See, if you think that matter and therefore the unified force under investigation are essentially static, then falling, flying, rolling, changing your mind, casting a spell, growing older, moving, are basically deviations from an essential state. Otherwise, you think that motion is part of the fabric of ontology, and the question’s how best to theorize that. You can tell where my sympathies lie. Staticists would say I’m misrepresenting them, but fuck it.

“So I’m a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified . . . you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves, how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

“When you pick up a piece of wood and hold it ten feet above the ground, it has more energy than when it’s on the ground. We call that potential energy, right? That’s not controversial among any scientist. Potential energy’s the energy that gives the wood the power to hurt you or mark the floor, a power it doesn’t have when it’s just resting on the ground. It has that energy when it’s motionless, like it was before, but when it could fall. If it does, the potential energy turns into kinetic energy, and you break your toe or whatever.

“See, potential energy’s all about placing something in a situation where it’s teetering, where it’s about to change its state. Just like when you put enough strain on a group of people, they’ll suddenly explode. They’ll go from grumpy and quiescent to violent and creative in one moment. The transition from one state to another’s affected by taking something—a social group, a piece of wood, a hex—to a place where its interactions with other forces make its own energy pull against its current state.

“I’m talking about taking things to the point of crisis.”