Dana was shaking him, her hand at his bare shoulder and ungentle. He had been vividly dreaming of her only the moment before. His astonishment was such now that he barely knew whether he dreamed or not.
He half sat up, supporting himself on his elbows, and gazed up stupidly at her. She was already dressed, wearing gray wool trousers and two soft blue sweaters, one with buttons over one without, a matching set.
Her hair was still damp from her shower, and he could smell her shampoo. The smell of it was so mysterious and of her that it pierced him through and through. The color of her sweaters corresponded to the color of her eyes with a precision that also affected him too deeply.
He would have liked it if she had smiled at him in the morning light. He wasn't certain if they were friends, if they had become friends at all in the course of the night.
"You'll have to hurry, Justin. I have breakfast with my father every morning. He's downstairs waiting, so please hurry and I'll wait for you."
These were the first words she spoke to him after the transfigurations of the night before, and he found them disturbing, unworthy, wrong.
"Can't I shower?"
His own first words to her sounded wrong, too—like a clumsy translation of what he had meant to say.
She glanced at the clock on her white night table.
"If you take no more than ten minutes altogether to get ready."
Her tone was sharp and cold, and it struck him as awful. She seemed an arbitrary manner of person to him then. He disliked people who insisted without cause, people who pushed forward their chosen trivialities as if they were laws of nature.
But then perhaps she was rather an arbitrary manner of person. Perhaps she was even awful. She was a pharaoh's daughter and might very well be quite awful. He didn't really know. He didn't know her at all. He had come the night before to speak of physics with her father, and she had listened with a strange rapture of attention, and she had taken him upstairs and to her bed and now here he was.
Had he only dreamed the transformations of last night, then? Had he only dreamed the tenderness of Samuel Mallach's daughter?
The words she had whispered with her mouth against his ear, the soft breaths and sighs and secrets she had told him in the movements that were love: dreams?
He knew that he had dreamed, that just before he had been shaken awake by her ungentle hand he had been lost in a swirling rivulet of dreams.
"I'll wait for you on the landing," she said, and this he accepted in gratitude as an act of kindness. He would never have been able to bring himself to climb out, in front of this Dana, a different Dana from the night before, from beneath the bedcovers, where he lay naked. She traversed thought processes that did not correspond in any way to his own and he did not know her in the least.
In the shower, he found himself thinking of his mother. Beneath the tapestry of nighttime sky she had told him stories to go with the stars, and many of them had been of lovers.
On those nights when it was just the two of them, his mother and he had indulged themselves in seeing constellations of their own choosing. In eight stars that appeared in the northern quadrant of the winter skies of Olympia, they had seen the enchanted ladder of the fairy girl's hair. In four dim stars they had found the prince who had scrambled up the ladder to find his pleasure. His love had deceived him and he had fallen down and been blinded by two thorns.
They picked out the stars that were the thorns in his eyes. They picked out the face hid amid a crowd of stars.
He lost track of the time, and then he had to dress in a hurry, putting on the clothes he had worn to dinner the night before, anxious that Dana might no longer be waiting for him, even though she had promised.
He found her standing with her back toward the mirror on the stairwell landing, where he had seen her face the first time in reflection. Wordlessly, they went together to join her father.
Samuel Mallach sat at the unclothed table, wide bands of brilliant sunshine falling in from the two windows behind him, catching the grain of the dark shining wood, strands of his limp gray hair lit to silver. He was frowning, intently putting marmalade on toast. He registered no surprise at all to see their dinner guest from the night before still with them, entering the dining room in the same suit and shirt and tie as he'd worn the evening before.
The door from the kitchen opened, and the silent woman who had brought them their food the night before now carried out a plate of toast, nodding wordlessly at Dana, her eyes darting to Justin and then away.
Samuel Mallach continued to spread his toast, very precisely and evenly, an activity that lasted in silence for several minutes. Finally, the task of toast completed, he turned to look at them both, studying first his daughter and then their visitor.
"I've been thinking about quantum nonlocality since last night," he finally announced.
Justin, who had never before awakened in a girl's home and in her bed, much less been forced to go down in the morning and take breakfast with her father, who was the physicist he admired the most in all the world, could not have been better pleased with this salutation, with its promise that Mallach and he would take up their discussion of the night before.
"Mmm, so have I," Dana answered her father. She had been served eggs by the silent woman. "What about you, Justin? Have you been thinking about nonlocality as well?"
Justin looked up from the plate of scrambled eggs that had been put at his own place. Samuel Mallach alone had been served no eggs. Dana was looking at him as she waited for him to answer. Although she was not unambiguously smiling, there was a slant to her mouth that looked possibly like hidden laughter. Justin was not confident, but it might be laughter.
"A little," he said in a noncommittal tone. "Yes, maybe a little."
"So you see we've all been thinking about nonlocality, which is something like nonlocality itself. Nonlocality of mind."
It was Dana who said this, and a fork skewering some egg stopped right before Justin's mouth. Dana's words were so extravagantly unexpected that he wondered if he had heard them quite as she had meant them. Before he could pursue the question in his own mind, her father spoke again.
"And, you, Professor Childs, do you believe that nature is nonlocal?"
Justin turned to stare at Mallach. Quantum nonlocality is the feature whereby particles, having once been subjected to quantum entanglement, will forever after continue to assert, even when widely separated, instantaneous influences over one another. It is a feature that, however counterintuitive and mysterious—not to speak of incompatible with relativity theory—it might appear to be, is a consequence of realistically interpreting the theory.
Justin cleared his throat, pondering the motivation behind Mallach's question, a confoundedly naïve-seeming query to be issuing from the man who last night had drawn forth the intimate secrets of particles and light, and had appeared to presume a certain level of understanding on the part of his invited guest.
"Yes, of course I think nature is nonlocal. How could I think otherwise, in light of your own objective formulation? The only alternative is the radical nonsense of the subjectivists."
"Do you think so? Dana thinks something very similar."
Justin was distracted by some movement to his right. A cup was filling up with steaming dark liquid. Coffee. He looked up and saw the silent woman—her name was Dora, Dana and her father always said it, Thank you, Dora— standing to his right, holding a silver urn from which she was pouring coffee into his cup.
"Not something very similar," Dana was saying to her father as Justin watched the coffee streaming from on high into his cup. Wasn't the woman afraid that it might splatter him? He glanced up at her and saw that her face was disagreeably set. She looked like she might well be intending to scald him. Or perhaps it just seemed so from the angle of his perception. "Identical."
Justin turned to Dana, whose words shocked him to the core. He had never considered the possibility that this pharaoh's girl might speak the language of the pharaoh; that her thought processes might correspond so closely to his own.
He had not known in his life a single girl who knew anything of significance in science. The tanned young beauties who had pedaled slowly past him on their bikes in Paradise, California, had never brought their slanting rays of light with them into the rooms where he had studied the laws of matter in motion, where he had studied the four-dimensional manifold of relativistic space-time.
Still, there were grounds yet remaining to doubt that Dana truly knew anything of physics, that she grasped the real nature and intent of the words she threw off so lightly while reconfiguring the scrambled eggs laid out on her plate.
"Nonlocality is merely the expression of quantum entanglement," she said, further eroding the grounds for doubt. Had she any more idea of what "entanglement" meant than she had of "nonlocality"? Her statement enclosed a gloriously sweeping insight, the scope of it nearly taking Justin's breath away, but was it, in any way, hers? Was she claiming it for her own? She might be repeating words she had heard, as a child does, producing the bizarre effect of infant brilliance.
"That's rather beautifully put, Dana," her father said. "That's very fine poetry. It's finely put, but is it true?"
Justin turned from the daughter to the father and then back again to her. But she did not return his gaze, though he focused all his thought on seeing through to her true nature. She appeared indifferent to his stare, her face in profile to him, her hair still slightly damp and darkened. She was gazing steadfastly at her father, the wide bands of sharp light turning the air around him into a glowy haze, the dust particles alit and dancing out their frenzied motions, the explanation of which had eventually won Einstein his highest prize. The Swedes had played it safe, granting him their recognition for the light he had shed on the dance of dust, rather than for his laying bare the structure of four-dimensional space-time.
"What is that poem I'm thinking of, Dana? You know the one I mean. How did that other poet put it?"
"All things linked are. Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star."
In the morning light, she quoted the poetry he demanded from her without blushing to the color of wine. She spoke it as if to get it out of the way.
"What do you think of that, Justin? It's also finely put, but is it true? Is it a consequence of our quantum reality?"
Justin looked from the father to the daughter and then back again to him.
"Don't you like eggs?"
He was surprised himself to hear the question he asked.
"My heart is bad," Mallach answered.