“Maybe placing you on the opposite end of the terminal will work out better for your partner this time.”
That was mean.
He was talking about Maxwell Malrog, a veteran pilot specializing in the Lesser Antilles routes who just up and went poof oopsie-gone one day, a disappearing act which confused and annoyed anyone in any position to care, not least of which because he took an Antonov An-2 – the Grim Honker – with him.
Penrose, having the upsetting distinction of being The Last One To See Him Alive, was called into the main office, whereupon he tried his best to recall – as blandly as possible, excising from the story as many details as he felt might be suspicious or incriminating – the final conversation the two had had, on an overnight to Martinique, when Penrose asked the ol’ graybeard why he was staring so… disdainfully at a map spread out on the middle console.
“I can move it if you want.”
“That’s not the problem. It’s not in the way.”
“OK, so, uh… why the mean look?”
“I have a problem with something on the map.”
“What?”
“That, right there.”
Malrog’s finger, quivering with the turbulence they had just hit – if not a certain accusatorial certainty – was pointing towards a corner on the map. Penrose looked there.
“That’s a compass rose, Max.”
“Yes. Exactly.” Eyeballing the symbol like he expected it to do something.
“A compass rose is a picture of a compass.”
“I know what a compass rose is.”
A moment, not a particularly comfortable one, in which Malrog looked at the compass rose, and Penrose looked at Malrog.
“It’s… a picture, Max. They just put it there. They don’t even need to anymore. Anyone knows anything knows what the cardinal directions are, what the principal winds are. It’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic.”
“Yeah.”
“A symbol of something.”
“That’s usually what symbolic means…?”
“A symbol of order in our depiction of available space.”
“… yes?”
“Sort of like stamping humanity’s seal of approval on nature.”
“I… guess? Never thought of it that way.”
“Maybe you should.”
Penrose, starting to suspect this dude might be fucking nuts, tried to lighten things up:
“Maybe we should go back to sea monsters, no?” Raising his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, ashing an invisible cigar. “See a monster in the margins, know it’s not so safe to go there? Eh, eh?”
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for the humility of a leviathan.”
Slowly lowering the pretend cigar, placing it in a pretend ashtray.
“… eh?”
A heaviness on Malrog’s brow. Not of anger, but sadness. Penrose wasn’t the only one convinced he was talking to an idiot.
“Claiming you’ve solved space because you divided it into grids is like claiming you’ve solved language because you realized certain words rhyme.”
“I… what?”
The Grim Honker had left the turbulence behind and was now pushing on silently through the clouds, noiseless space giving way to noiseless space. A dark withholding. The sky had something to say, but so far was content to let Malrog say it.
“We laid a coördinate plane upon the surface of the world,” he continued, “and declared it tamed. That was arrogance. But it was understandable.
“It must have been exciting, feeling like we had mounted something so wild, ridden a monster into strict compliance with our… rules. But, for Heaven’s sake, to forget so easily. To calm ourselves with a mathematical lullaby until we forget its origins and believe it to be a” – nearly choking on this one – “law. Where are we supposed to go from there? How do you build humility off of a foundation of fear? What are you supposed to do with a system that attempts to divide by zero at two separate locations?! We still argue over the true longitudinal locus! I’ll go to Hell before I set my watch to the French meridian!”
The conversation had taken a turn. Also, was it getting darker in here? And w-why was the only remaining visible light falling in a horizontal band directly across Malrog’s face, making him look like a young Lugosi?
“B-but, what about n-vector representation?!?” Penrose shot back. “No singularities, everything is one-to-one… it’s mathematically well-behaved! A function you can take home to mom! A keeper! A real knockout!”
“But you still need to choose a frame of reference!”
It was around this time Penrose realized he had never appreciated how interesting his knees were, and decided to see how long he could stare at them. Peaceful silence ensued. Some time later, as he was nodding off, he heard this:
“It isn’t absurd to want to head north and continue heading north, no matter how far North you’ve already gone. Direction being told to bend around and come back simply because it’s about to go farther than we’re comfortable with… why should space owe us anything? It was here before we were…
“What if I repudiate these geodesics? Would that be enough?”
Penrose lifted his head, expecting to see Malrog turned towards him with that maniacal gaze again. But the goofy old bird still had his eyes forward, was looking straight out the window. He wasn’t talking to Penrose at all.
Was he… talking to the sky?
Was he negotiating with It…?
What were the terms…?