Jane Jensen - Dante's equation

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Jane Jensen

BALLANTINEBOOKS• NEWYORK

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One finds, through a study of the implications of the quantum theory, that the analysis of a total

system into a set of independently existent but interacting particles breaks down . . . the various

articles [of physical matter] have to be taken literally as projections of a highe

-dimensional reality

which cannot be accounted for in terms of any force of interaction between them.

—David Bohm,

Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980

By looking into the microscope we peer at G-d. Science is the face of the Ein Sof.

—

Yosef Kobinski,The Book o

Merc

, 1935

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Book One

The

One-minus-One

We are like Midas . . . Humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality because

everything we touch turns to matter.

—

Physicist Nick Herbert

1.1. Denton Wyle

MARCH

ABOARD THECOASTGUARDMLB INVINCIBLEII,

OFF THE COAST OF FLORIDA

Denton Wyle was seriously reexamining his choices. His fingers were wrapped like living clamps

around a pole, his blond hair dribbled water down his patrician nose, and his back pressed hard

against the cabin of the rescue ship as sea spray slapped him on the cheeks like an outraged

Englishman and the deck beneath his feet pitched like a bucking bronco.

He was on a ship, in a storm, smack dab in the Bermuda Triangle.

The Coast Guard crewmen, bright orange specks in a wet, gray world, moved about the tilting

slippery deck with ease. They were on a mission to locate a yacht, theWhy Knot Now , in distress off

the Florida Keys. A sailing advisory was in effect and the yacht, manned by a couple and their

teenage daughter, had radioed that their compass appeared to be in error, because they were lost and

didn’t know which way to go to find land.

It was the call Denton had been waiting for, hanging out in the Coast Guard station for weeks now,

schmoozing with men who had sea salt in their eyebrows. A bad compass? A lost vessel? Denton

Wyle, intrepid reporter forMysterious World , was all over it.

Only now he realized, as his fingers spasmed from being clenched so tightly around the pole, that the

two key words in this entire scenario were notbad compass or evenBermuda Triangle butsailing

advisory .Sailing advisory meaning: “our advice is, don’t go out on a freaking ship.”

“Wyle?” A rain-soaked face in a blue hard hat appeared. It was Frank, a burly New Yorker. Denton

had spent an afternoon watching him hose down nylon netting.

“Yeah?”

“Get. Inside. The cabin.” The words were shouted over the howl of the wind and s

honic crash of

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waves. Frank hung lightly with one hand to the pole just above Denton’s white knuckles. With the

other he jabbed an index finger at the cabin behind them.

“I’m fine,” Denton shouted back, because moving anywhere meant letting go of the pole.

But Frank had been trained in dealing with the hapless. He grabbed Denton’s upper arm and pulled.

Behind Frank the side of the rescue boat was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and its thin,

insubstantial metal rail kept dipping in and out of churning water. Denton could so clearly imagine

sliding into that maw if he let go, just like the scene fromJaws where the fishing boat captain slides

down the deck into the shark’s mouth.

“Comeon !” Frank yelled.

Denton let go. There was a panicked moment of sliding feet; then the cabin door was in his hand and

Frank shoved him through, slamming the door behind him.

Inside, Denton stood panting, trying to get a firmer grip on his breakfast. He made no pretensions of

ravery. The right stuff had been left out of hisgenetic code; he could admit that. But he was also not

a boat person. Even growing up on the shores of Massachusetts, where yachting clubs got better

attendance on Sundays than churches, he had not liked boats. What on earth had he been thinking?

He hadn’t been thinking about the Bermuda Triangle or the sea. He’d been thinking about woods,

about a little girl and flashes of light.

The rain lashed the windows so hard you couldn’t see a thing on deck from inside the cabin, only

great watery swells as they blocked out the sky.

“They keep fading in and out of radar,” one of the crewmen reported.

Captain Dodd looked from the window to the radar screen and back again, peering out with

squinting eyes. “How far?”

“About five hundred meters.”

“Move closer. Slowly.” Dodd never took his eyes off that window.

Denton found this conversation curious enough to nudge awake his reporter’s instincts. He

remembered the camera that had been flopping around on his chest for the past hour. He dried it with

his sleeve and took some snapshots. It made him feel a little better.

“Damn it, we should have a visual by now!” Dodd stomped to a rack of gear and grabbed a rain

oncho. “I’m goin’ out. I’ll send Johnson in to watch for my signal.”

The wind intensified as the door opened and closed. Denton moved in to get a tight shot of the radar

screen. He didn’t recognize the operator, a baby-faced kid, no more than nineteen. He seemed

amazingly unafraid, unfazed by the heaving deck beneath them or the towering waves above. He was

intent on trying to tune in a better signal.

“Which blip is theirs?” Denton asked, teeth chattering.

The operator pointed to a faint ping, barely there. For a few seconds it went away; then it reappeared.

“We’re not sure that’s them, but we’re close to their last recorded position.” The kid looked up.

“You oka

?”

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“Fine.”

“You look chalky.”

“I’m . . .” Denton glanced up and saw a gigantic wall of water. The wave slipped beneath them with

a pitch and roll. “. . . fine. Look, does the radar usually do that? Fade in and out?”

The operator looked around, as if someone else could answer for him. “It’s not supposed to, but this

is pretty bad weather.”

The wind blasted again as Johnson came in and took up a position by the window. Denton watched

the blip disappear. This time, it didn’t come back.

And it didn’t come back.

He felt a rising sense of excitement at the sight of that dead screen. A headline was taking shape in

his head:Coast Guard Witnesses Disappearance of Vessel on Radar in Bermuda Triangle. He took

more pictures, struggled to see out the window.

Johnson held up a hand. “Starboard! Thirty degrees!”

The atmosphere in the cabin changed instantly from one of grim worry to confidence and

competency. It was amazing what the willpower of man could do, Denton reflected, even in the face

of something as elemental as this storm. The ship turned, the men shouting instructions, working as

one. Their energy was so intense that for a moment he glimpsed what it would be like to be one of

these boatmen, mastering the great watery tide.

There was a flash of another vessel in the window, but it disappeared in the rain and waves. Denton

couldn’t see a damn thing in here. He had to go outside.

ow that the ship had turned, the deck was tilting the other way and Denton had no problem

grabbing the pole from the cabin door. He clung to it, wrapping his legs around it like a pogo stick,

and managed to bring up his camera. They were indeed approaching another ship.

Captain Dodd was at the bow with the other crewmen. He was motioning the helm operator into

osition as they approached the smaller vessel through the heaving sea. It was a small yacht. Denton

struggled to make out the name on the side.

Why Knot Now.

Crap.

Denton’s excitement faded along with the headlines in his mind. They’d found the boat. There was

no story. He’d come out here for nothing.

The crew secured a line to theWhy Knot Now , and two of them, like Day-Glo monkeys, made a

death-defying cross to the deck.

And Denton realized that something was wrong.

He snapped another photograph as the two men went inside the cabin of the yacht. The two men

came out. One scrambled back over to confer with the captain while the other moved around the side

of the yacht, his face turned out to sea, searching. And Denton knew: theWhy Knot Now was empty.

***

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“So what happened to them?” Jack demanded.

Denton had made the mistake of calling his editor on his cell phone before he’d gone out on the

rescue, and there were three messages waiting when he returned to the hotel. By the time he’d gotten

out of a hot shower, Jack had rung again.

Denton rubbed his eyes with both hands, the receiver crooked in his neck.

“The official report says they went overboard and drowned. But they didn’t, Jack, I swear. There

were two life preservers untouched on the rail. It’s unlikely they all three would have gone in at

once, and if they’d gone in one at a time they would have used the preservers, right? We searched for

two hours—there wasnothing.”

Jack didn’t answer. No answer was possible. They’d both been in this business long enough to know

a dead end when they saw it. “Did you get pictures inside the yacht?”

“No.” Denton sighed. “Dodd wouldn’t let me on board. But one of the guardsmen told me nothing

was out of place over there. Not so much as a cushion.”

“Well . . . write up what you’ve got. See if you can make it work.”

Jack didn’t sound very enthusiastic. There was no reason that he should be. And the real frustration

was that it might well have been a legitimate case. And he’d been there.He’d been right the hell

there. And he still had squat.

The series of articles on vanishings had been Jack’s idea, but Denton had been all over it. There were

some interesting historical cases. In 1809 an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst stopped at an

inn. He went around the coach to check the horses and was never seen again. In 1900 Sherman

Church went into a cotton mill in Michigan and never came out. Ever. In 1880 a farmer named

David Lang was walking across his pasture when he simplywinked out according to five

eyewitnesses. The grass where he disappeared was said to have died and never grown back.

And there was one even Jack didn’t know about. In 1975 a little girl named Molly Brad vanished in a

flash of light while playing in the woods.

Over two hundred thousand people were reported missing in the United States each year. And while

most of those were probably runaways, deadbeats, or undiscovered homicides, Denton didn’t think it

beyond the realm of possibility that some of them, just acouple , were like David Lang.

But he was never going to prove it here.

“I’m ready to come home. The Bermuda Triangle angle isn’t happening. I mean, I believe there are

laces where vanishings are more likely to happen, and that this is one of them. But if someone

disappears out here there’s no way to prove they didn’t go into the sea. We need . . . I don’t know,

more of a ‘locked room’ scenario. And call me a freaking idealist, but an eyewitness or two wouldn’t

hurt.” Denton heard the whine in his voice. He was tired.

“Funny you should say that. Did you get that package I sent?”

Denton looked at the red, white, and blue mailer by the door. “Yeah. What is it?”

“Take a look. But don’t get distracted. I need you to finish theTriangle article. It’s due Tuesday.”

“I know. It’s almost done.” Mostl

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“Good. You sound bushed. I’ll let you get some sleep. ‘Night, Dent.”

“’Night.”

He almost didn’t open the package. His legs were the consistency of pâté from trying to brace

himself on the ship for five hours, and the volume of adrenaline that had passed through his veins

had left him with a hangover. But Jack’s hints had taken hold. He couldn’t go to sleep without

knowing.

He ripped open the pull tab and looked inside. It was a book:Tales from the Holocaust.

It made no sense, because the Holocaust had nothing to do with the article he was working on. And

yet that good old Wyle instinct roiled in his gut like the turning of some gigantic subterranean worm.

He opened to the earmarked page and began to read.

1.2. Aharon Handalman

JERUSALEM

Such a city.Rabbi Aharon Handalman had lived in Jerusalem for twelve years, and he was still

amazed by it. He always left home before the crack of dawn so he could watch the sunlight warm the

stones. There was a cold bite to the air this morning. His black wool coat and hat absorbed it like a

sponge.

Aharon, along with his wife, Hannah, and their three children, lived in the new Orthodox housing

near the Valley of Ben-Hinnom. At this time of the day, without the squeal and clamor of little ones,

the plain, square apartments felt as hollow as cardboard boxes. They fell away behind him as he

walked, the ancient walls appearing on his right like the edge of a woman’s skirts.

He drew close to the Jaffa gate. Before it rose the Tower of David, a thin and pointed shadow in the

darkness. He turned into the city, the stone rising above his head. His fingers trailed along the arch as

he passed, theShma Yisroel on his lips.

Down the ancient avenue he went, into the heart of Yerushalayim. The roads outside these walls—

especially Jaffa Road—were too modern for his tastes. Advertisements for Camel cigarettes and

doughnuts marred shop fronts. But once you were inside, the twenty-first century fell away. Now he

only had to deal with the indignities of the Christian Quarter on the left and the Armenian on the

right. He walked quickly past these invaders, his lip curling. He could continue straight ahead, but it

was his habit to turn into the heart of the Jewish Quarter, choosing alleys and courtyards for their

aroma of antiquity. Later today, they would be crowded with kaftans and T-shirts, with cheap

madonnas and stars of David. But now they were only dim stone chutes that might have existed a

thousand years ago, two thousand, more.

e,Rabbi Aharon Handalman, might have been from a different time as well: forty years old, of

average height and weight, still handsome, brown eyes glittering, brown beard free from gray as it

hung long and untrimmed, his black clothes roughly twentieth-century. If the clock were rolled back

twenty years he would not be out of place; two hundred years and the cut of his clothing might be a

bit odd; two thousand years, put him in a different outfit and call it good. He liked to think that at

heart,at heart, he was unchanged from his ancestors, unchanged from an Israelite who trod this very

ath on his way to the Temple in the days of Jeremiah. Reading the Scriptures Aharon identified

exactly with the feelings of the prophets: that Jerusalem was storing up sins for some divine

retribution thanks to the unholy ways of her people. In the days of Jeremiah that had meant harlots

and drunkards and Jews with no sense of their past. In the days of Aharon Handalman that meant

cut-off shorts and Uzis and Jews with no sense of their

ast. Even Moses had voiced the same

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frustration:You are a hard-necked people. More than stones never changed.

Aharon went past the Dung Gate, down a set of stairs, and through a security checkpoint. The

soldiers knew him but insisted on patting him down. Orthodox rabbis drew as much suspicion as

Palestinians these days, but with the crazy state of the world, who could blame them? Then he was

through and in front ofHaKotel , the Western Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple.

The light was rosy, pinkening the cream-colored edifice. As always, he approached with a sense of

rivilege, of excitement, like a bridegroom. He crossed to the wall, lowering his hands gently to the

cold stone, then his forehead, with the tender sigh of a lover.

Around him were several dozen others saying their morning prayers at this sacred spot. Some

wereharedim with beards, side-locks, and fur hats. Aharon, who was Orthodox but notharedim , had

a beard but no side-locks, and his hat was a simple black wool fedora with akippa , a skullcap,

underneath.

He joined a minyan of early risers from his synagogue and opened his briefcase. He took out

histallith andtefillin , kissing them. He wrapped himself in the prayer shawl and put on the ancient

leather straps with their boxes of Scripture on first his left arm, then his forehead. And he began to

ray, rocking in front of the wall.

Even though there was no pretense in it, he was not unaware of the picture he made: stately, paternal,

rabbinical. He was proud to be making it. Someone had to show the world what being a Jew was all

about.

An hour later, Aharon was in his office atAish HaTorah .Aish HaTorah was a “master of the return”

school, designed to teach Unorthodox Jews the ways of Orthodoxy. The Jews in question were

usually young Americans whose parents were nonpracticing or (which was maybe worse)

Conservative or Reformed. Aharon taught Talmud and Midrash. It wasn’t much money, but it placed

him across from the wall all day, and his class schedule left him plenty of time to pursue hisreal

assion—Torah code.

The code was the flame in Aharon’s heart. The greatest rabbis had always known there were

messages hidden in the Torah, but the sages, may they rest in peace, didn’t have microchips. Now

you could run a program, give it a keyword likeheaven , and the search routine would scan the

Hebrew letters of the Torah looking for the keyword hidden in the text. A “hidden” word appeared

via Equidistant Letter Spacing—the ELS or skip. For example, the plaintext phrase “The Rabbis

hoped and prayed for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being,

Eretz Yisrael” contained the hidden wordheaven at a skip of eleven: “The Rabbish oped and prayed

for God to lead the people over land and over sea to the kingdom of their being, Eretz Yisrael.”

What had really stunned the world was the presence of arrays ofrelated words and phrases in the

Hebrew Bible. Arrays were arrangements of the plaintext letters into columns the width of the skip.

These arrays made it easier to find related words or phrases near the original keyword.

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The fact that such arrays were sought in theHebrew version of the text made the task both easier and

harder.

But . . . the scientific community was outraged, naturally. What good could atheists have to say

about divinely implanted messages? Their most damning rebuttal showed that similar “themed word

arrays” could be found in any text—War and Peace,for example. Hence Aharon’s current line of

research.

He was still puzzling over the latest stack of printouts when Binyamin Yoriv came in.

“Good!” Aharon grunted. “I have a riddle for you.”

“Is that from last night’s test?” Binyamin crossed to the desk.

Aharon shrank back. The boy had halitosis and a skin problem that left scales in his wake. It was

written that God gave everyone a mix of assets and flaws, but Binyamin’s assets, like the Torah code

itself, were extremely well hidden.

“What happened?” Binyamin asked. “Was there a bug in the program?”

“No.”

“But there are too many pages.”

“Nothing is lost on you, Binyamin.”

Aharon waited for the boy to catch on as he scanned the three-inch stack. His scaly eyebrows went

up. “Hey, one of our search phrases, ‘Yosef Kobinski,’ is reallyinall these arrays. That’s strange.”

“Strange? Three hundred arrays for one little rabbi. As usual, you understate the case.”

Aharon wheeled his chair to the left, not only to get away from Binyamin’s exhalation zone but also

to pick up Chachik’sEncyclopedia—a Who’s Who of Jewish scholars. “I would say my theory has

been disproven, wouldn’t you?”

“Whatwasyour theory?”

Aharon felt a spark of aggravation. He had explained this three or four times already. “Witzum, Rips,

and Rosenberg, in theirStatistical Science article, took the names of the thirtygreatestrabbis from this

very encyclopedia. They found code arrays for each rabbi where his name appeared close to his birth

and death dates,nu ?”

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JaneJensenBALLANTINEBOOKS•NEWYORKPage1of1Dante'sEquation15/06/2005file://E:\---------unitatsanticordinador---------\---------unitatGantigaOK---------\di...Onefinds,throughastudyoftheimplicationsofthequantumtheory,thattheanalysisofatotalsystemintoasetofindependentlyexistentbutinteractingparticlesbrea...

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Jane Jensen - Dante's equation

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