It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics departments before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had ever even heard of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which, now that he thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair. Was there anything in life as male as mathematics had been? And why was that?
Disconcerting in a different way was the fact that areas of Bao’s work were based on the unpublished papers of a Thai mathematician of the previous century, an unstable young man named Samui, who had lived in Bangkok brothels and committed suicide at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind several “last problems” in the manner of Fermat, and insisting to the end that all of his math had been dictated to him by telepathic aliens. Bao had ignored all that and explained some of Samui’s more obscure innovations, and then used them to develop a group of expressions called advanced Rovelli-Smolin operators, which allowed her to establish a system of spin networks that meshed with superstrings very beautifully. In effect this was the complete uniting of quantum mechanics and gravity at last, the great problem solved— if it were true. And true or not, it had been powerful enough to allow Bao to make several specific predictions in the larger realms of the atom and the cosmos; and some of these had since been confirmed.
So now she was the queen of physics— the first queen of physics— and experimentalists in labs all over were on-line to Da Vinci, anxious to have more suggestions from her. The afternoon sessions in the seminar room were invested with a palpable sense of tension and excitement; Max Schnell would start the meeting, and at some point call on Bao; and she would stand and go to the screen at the front of the room, plain, graceful, demure, firm, pen flying over the screen as she gave them a way to calculate precisely the neutrino mass, or described very specifically the ways strings vibrated to form the different quarks, or quantized space so that gravitinos were divided into three families, and so on; and her colleagues and friends, perhaps twenty men and one other woman, would interrupt to ask questions, or add equations that explained side issues, or tell the rest of them about the latest results from Geneva or Palo Alto or Rutherford; and during that hour, they all knew they were at the center of the world.
And in labs on Earth and Mars and in the asteroid belt, following her work, unusual gravity waves were noted; in very difficult delicate experiments; particular geometric patterns were revealed in the fine fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation; dark-matter WIMPs and shadow-matter WISPs were being sought out; the various families of leptons and fermions and leptoquarks were explained; galactic clumping in the first inflation was provisionally solved; and so on. It seemed as if physics might be on the brink of the Final Theory at last. Or at least in the midst of the Next Big Step.
• • •
Given the significance of what Bao was doing, Sax felt shy about speaking to her. He did not want to waste her time on trivial things. But one afternoon at a kava party, out on one of the arc balconies overlooking Da Vinci’s crater lake, she approached him— even more shy and stumbling than he was— so much so that he was forced into the very unusual position of trying to put someone else at ease, finishing sentences for her and the like. He did that as best he could, and they stumbled along, talking about his old Russell diagrams for gravitinos, useless now he would have thought, though she said they still helped her to see gravitational action. And then when he asked a question about that day’s seminar, she was much more relaxed. Yes, clearly that was the way to put her at ease; he should have thought of it immediately. It was what he liked himself.
After that, they got in the habit of talking from time to time. He always had to work to draw her out, but it was interesting work. And when the dry season came, in the fall helionequinox, and he started going out sailing again from the little harbor Alpha, he asked her haltingly if she would like to join him, and they stuttered their way through a deeply awkward interaction, which resulted in her going out with him the next nice day, sailing in one of the lab’s many little catamarans.
When day sailing, Sax stayed in the little bay called the Florentine, southeast of the peninsula, where Ravi Fjord widened but before it became Hydroates Bay. This was where Sax had learned to sail, and where he still felt best acquainted with the winds and currents. On longer trips he had explored the delta of fjords and bays at the bottom end of the Marineris system, and three or four times he had sailed up the eastern side of the Chryse Gulf, all the way to Mawrth Fjord and along the Sinai Peninsula.
On this special day, however, he confined himself to the Florentine. The wind was from the south, and Sax tacked down into it, enlisting Bao’s help at every change of tack. Neither of them said much. Finally, to get things started, Sax was forced to ask about physics. They talked about the ways in which strings constituted the very fabric of space-time itself, rather than being replacements for points in some absolute abstract grid.