Chapter 6

Sheep

Max turned another page of the tattered hardback, easing his thumb beneath the paper before lifting it. The cover had once been navy blue. Now it had the softened colour of old denim, and the title, The Little Prince, remained just visible where his fingers had not quite worn it away. The spine had ceased to perform its intended function some years earlier. He held the book in a way that compensated for its failures, hardly noticing that he did so. He had cherished it since he was a boy, first for the pictures and the peculiar little world they made possible, then for the words, and eventually for the feeling that something within those words remained just beyond his understanding.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written the story in 1942, and it appeared the following year in French and in Katherine Woods’s English translation. As its readership spread, Woods’s version also provided a basis for translations into other languages, carrying her phrasing beyond the audience for which it had originally been intended. For generations of readers, most of the world would come to read the famous line: Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was scarcely any bigger than himself, and who had need of a sheep.

Max sat against a mound of pillows on Magnus’s bed. Most of the available space technically belonged to his son, although an oversized stuffed fox lay across the foot of the mattress with the comfortable entitlement of a long-term resident. Years of affection had redistributed its stuffing. Its head was fuller on one side than the other, and one leg folded beneath it at an angle that would have required urgent attention in a living animal. Rockets and planets covered the sheets, their colours faded by washing. Magnus’s pyjamas followed much the same theme. At eight, he had not yet discovered any reason why a person should ration his enthusiasm for space.

“But it’s just a drawing,” Magnus said. He lay curled against Max’s side, his head resting on his father’s chest. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, well, this story can be a little hard to follow.” Max’s voice was hoarse from late nights and conversations that had continued well past the point at which they should have become tomorrow’s conversations. He looked down at the fair head beneath his chin. “We can read something else if you want.”

“No. I want this book. It’s not hard.” Magnus worried a loose thread on the blanket, then added, with the honesty of somebody making a minor adjustment to a defensible position, “I understand most of it.”

“All right,” Max said. “Tell me.”

“A pilot crashes his plane in the desert. Then he meets a boy called the Little Prince, and the prince asks him to draw a sheep.” Magnus lifted one hand to count off the important parts. “But he’s really picky. He doesn’t like any of them. So the pilot draws a box with air holes and says the sheep’s inside, and the prince says that one’s perfect.” He looked up. “That’s what happens.”

“It is. Sounds as though you’re keeping up.” Max tilted the book so they could both see the page. “What’s bothering you?”

“The drawing of the sheep. It’s rubbish.” Magnus frowned at the illustration with the offended concentration he brought to things that seemed unfair. “You can’t even see it. Why does he like that one more than the proper pictures?”

Max laughed, and Magnus immediately lengthened the word Dad into an accusation. “Sorry,” Max said, bringing his laughter under control. “It’s a good question. I wasn’t laughing at you.”

Magnus continued to watch him for a moment, establishing whether the apology was adequate. Then another thought arrived. “Can I be an astronaut when I’m older?”

“You can be whatever you put your mind to,” Max said. He smoothed a crease in his son’s sleeve. “Asking questions is an important part of any job. Especially that one. And you’re very good at asking questions.”

Magnus grinned, pleased in a way he had not yet learned to conceal. Max could see the gaps and unevenness of teeth still negotiating their permanent arrangement. He wanted, suddenly and without any clear reason, to remember that exact smile.

“Now,” he said, closing the book with one finger between the pages, “shall we try something else? This one’s a bit heavy for bedtime.”

“But wasn’t it your favourite when you were my age?” Magnus shifted upright before Max could answer properly. “Then I want to read it too. You can explain the hard bits. Like the sheep in the box.”

Max shook his head, smiling. “Spoiler alert: the book never tells us exactly why he likes that drawing best. People have ideas. Nobody can give you an answer the story settles for us.”

Magnus considered this with increasing suspicion. “Dad, I thought you knew everything. Why would you like a book you don’t understand?”

Max looked at the worn cover beneath his hand. He could have made a joke about the first part of the question, but the second deserved something better. Before answering, he glanced towards the open doorway. The house was quiet. Not simply free of noise, but quiet in a way that made him conscious of speaking into it. Daphne usually joined them for at least part of story time. He wondered where she was.

He had returned to this book repeatedly, as a child and later as an adult, with the conviction that its simplicity concealed something more intricate. Perhaps that said more about him than the story. He had never been comfortable accepting a theoretical formula merely because it produced the expected result. He wanted to know what assumptions supported it, what those assumptions excluded and what might become possible if one of them changed. With the book, the impulse persisted even when there was no calculation to perform. Something between its pages continued to invite him farther in.

Daphne had spent more than twenty years as Professor of Mythology and Religious Philosophy at Georgetown University. Her work examined philosophical ideas expressed through religious traditions, myths and the stories cultures used to account for their place in the world. Plato and Dante, Gnostic writings and ancient epics belonged to a field of enquiry in which the relationship between a story and its meaning was seldom straightforward. She had published dozens of papers, written several acclaimed books on comparative mythology, and developed a public lecture series whose audiences extended well beyond the university.

Max had met her at one of those evening seminars. The subject was The Little Prince. He enrolled because of his lifelong fascination with the book, expecting an interesting argument and perhaps a few answers. Afterwards he found himself inventing further questions because asking them gave him a reason to remain near her. She eventually noticed. Daphne noticed most things, although she did not always reveal when she had done so.

Over the years she had become particularly accomplished at teasing him about his attachment to the book. His scientific interpretations generally met philosophical alternatives delivered with enough intelligence to make dismissing them impossible and enough affection to make losing the argument bearable. Sometimes he suspected she was right. He did not consider it necessary to report every such occasion.

Satisfied that the doorway remained empty, he leaned towards Magnus. “Do you want to hear a theory of mine?” he whispered.

Magnus’s eyes widened. He moved closer, adopting the gravity appropriate to confidential information. “Is this so Mum doesn’t hear? Is it science stuff?”

“Something like that. She teases me about it. Best not to give her more material.” Max lowered the book into his lap. “I’ve always thought there might be another story hiding inside this one. Something most people don’t notice.”

The wall lights flickered.

Both of them looked up. The light weakened, recovered, then weakened again before settling into its usual warm glow. Max waited for another change. Beside him, Magnus had stopped moving altogether, the loose thread held between two small fingers. They remained like that for several seconds, watching the lights long after there was anything to watch.

“Dad?” Magnus said.

“Yes, Moonbeam.” Max kept his voice easy.

Magnus looked towards the doorway, then back at him. “Is the house haunted?”

“Of course not.” Max rubbed his son’s shoulder. “It’s an old house. The wiring needs attention, and the renovations will get done as soon as I’m back. I’ve got some ideas for the whole place, actually. Better Wi-Fi, home automation—”

Magnus had turned towards the corner. The timber panelling there did not sit quite flush with the wall. It was darker than the surrounding wood, part of an older structure that had been incorporated into the room rather than removed. Max followed his gaze and allowed the proposed improvements to trail off.

“Sometimes, when the lights do that, I feel like there are ghosts in the walls,” Magnus said. He pointed without quite extending his arm. “I hear them. Banging.”

“Well, that’s normal when you’re frightened,” Max said. “Your brain tries to make sense of things you can’t see properly. If it hasn’t got enough information, it fills in the gaps. Sometimes it gets them wrong.”

Magnus was silent for a while. Max watched him arranging the explanation alongside something he had already been thinking about. Then his son asked, very quietly, “What if it’s the other way around?”

“The other way around?”

“What if things are there all the time, but we can’t see them?” Magnus swallowed. “What if we can only see them when we’re scared?”

Children proposed strange explanations. Max knew that. They had fewer established limits on what they considered possible, and sometimes reached a disturbing idea by a route that meant very little to them. Yet Magnus had spoken carefully, with the precision of somebody attempting to communicate a distinction he expected an adult to misunderstand.

“Magnus—” Max began, but his son interrupted.

“Not when somebody’s mean to you. Not that scared.” His voice trembled, and he pressed his forearm against Max’s. “The other sort. When all your hairs stand up.”

The lights pulsed once. It was quick enough that Max might have dismissed it if they had not both been watching. Shadows lengthened along the uneven corner, giving the wood a brief impression of movement. Something narrow seemed to extend from the dark seam and withdraw before his eyes could establish its shape. Then a sharp rustling came from behind the panelling, followed by a scrape.

“That,” Max said, “is a mouse.”

“A mouse?” Magnus did not sound convinced, but he sounded willing to be convinced, which was a different and more urgent thing.

“They get into wall spaces. Sometimes they chew insulation. If one’s damaged a cable, that could explain the lights.” Max looked at the corner as he spoke, waiting for the sound to repeat.

“It sounds big. Too big for a mouse.”

“Hollow spaces can make small noises sound much larger. The timber carries the vibration, and the space behind it changes what you hear.” He stroked Magnus’s hair. “A little mouse can sound like something enormous if it’s in the wrong place.”

Magnus gradually settled against him again. His hand released the blanket thread. “You’re sure?”

“Positive,” Max said. The certainty came readily because he wanted to give it to him. “I’ll call someone in the morning.”

His son nodded and drew the duvet higher. For a moment Max thought the discussion had ended. Then Magnus shifted beneath his arm. “But Dad. The story. You said you knew why he wanted the box.”

“I said I had a theory.” Max glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“Just tell me. Please. Then we can read more tomorrow.” Magnus turned his face upwards, presenting the request with a sincerity that made resistance feel unnecessarily severe.

Max sighed and looked towards the doorway again. Still empty. “All right. But I never solved the whole book. I found pieces. Things that might be clues. Perhaps we can work out the rest together.” He paused while Magnus absorbed the promotion from listener to accomplice. “Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat?”

In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment that exposed a difficulty in extending the mathematics of quantum mechanics into the everyday world. He imagined a cat enclosed in a box with a radioactive source, a detector and a mechanism capable of releasing poison. A radioactive decay would trigger the mechanism and kill the cat; if no decay occurred, the cat would remain alive. The arrangement linked a macroscopic outcome—the condition of a living animal—to an event described by quantum theory.

The problem arose when the quantum description was applied to the entire arrangement. A superposition of decayed and undecayed states became correlated with the detector, the mechanism and, ultimately, the living and dead states of the cat. Schrödinger was drawing attention to the troubling implications of that description, rather than proposing that ordinary cats visibly occupied both conditions. The question was where and how the range of possibilities described by the mathematics became the definite outcome encountered in an experiment. Opening the box provided the familiar image of an observation, but the difficulty concerned physical measurement and its interpretation, not a magical power belonging to human eyesight.

Max explained it without equations, watching his son’s face for the point at which simplification became confusion. Magnus listened intently until the mechanism was described, then frowned. “Does the box have air holes?”

“Erm. I don’t think the usual version specifies—”

“Will the cat become radioactive?”

“No. That isn’t what the radioactive bit is for.”

“Is it a zombie cat?” Magnus looked both appalled and interested.

Max laughed softly. “Excellent questions. But no. And nobody actually has to put a cat in that box. It’s something to think about.”

Magnus appeared relieved on the cat’s behalf. Max rested a hand on the book and considered how to explain the rest without delivering a lecture to somebody whose eyelids had already begun to lower.

“Most people would say the cat and the prince’s sheep don’t have much in common apart from being in boxes,” he said. “They’re probably right. The sheep isn’t a quantum experiment. But the idea interests me. With the cat, you have a box that makes the result into a question. With the sheep, the box seems to answer the question.”

Magnus’s forehead creased. Max turned back to the illustration and held it where his son could see it.

“The prince doesn’t like the sheep the pilot draws. Each one has something wrong with it. But when the pilot draws the box, he can’t see anything wrong with the sheep, because he can’t see the sheep at all. He imagines the one he wants, and the pilot gives him somewhere for it to be.”

“So there is a sheep?”

“In the way they’re talking about it, yes.” Max paused. “That’s the part I keep coming back to. He asks for a drawing. He doesn’t ask the pilot to go and find a real sheep. Somehow, a picture is enough. And when the picture stops showing him the thing he asked for, it becomes better.” He looked down at the page. “It’s as though the problem can be solved by agreeing about something neither of them can see. Sharing a belief.”

Magnus thought about that for several seconds. “So it’s a magic sheep.”

“Something like that,” Max whispered, smiling. “I’ve always felt it mattered. I just haven’t worked out why.” He closed the book properly this time. “And that really is enough for tonight.”

“Can we read more tomorrow?”

“Of course. No more ghosts tonight, all right?” Max placed the hardback on the bedside table.

Magnus made a sleepy sound of agreement, then murmured, “Still doesn’t make sense.”

“One day,” Max said, “we’ll work it out.”

He waited while his son drifted into sleep. Magnus’s weight settled more completely against him, and the breathing beneath his hand became regular. Max eased himself away a little at a time, careful not to wake him. He tucked the duvet around the small shoulders, moved the fox’s leg out of the way and bent to kiss his forehead. “I love you, Moonbeam,” he whispered.

Magnus did not stir. Max stood, waited for the mattress to stop creaking and turned towards the door.

Daphne was there.

She stood with her arms folded, watching him with an expression whose warmth did nothing to diminish its authority. Max wondered how long she had been listening. Long enough, evidently. “Maximus,” she said softly. “What have I told you about filling our son’s head with quantum physics?”

She pushed away from the frame and came into the room. Her movements were unhurried. He remained where he was, caught between the desire to defend himself and the recognition that doing so would supply her with further amusement.

“And your little conspiracy theory about that book,” she added. She glanced at Magnus, sleeping beneath his rockets and planets. “His school friends already tease him enough because of who his dad is. Don’t recruit him into that as well.”

“But he asked—” Max began.

Her arms went around his waist before he could continue. She rested her head against his chest, and his explanation ceased to seem worth completing. The scent of her hair reached him. Familiar, close, so much a part of home that he ordinarily noticed it only when he had been away.

“Shut up, Max,” she said against his shirt. “Just tell me you love me.”

His breath caught. He held her more tightly than he intended. “I love you, Flower.”

The name had developed through a sequence neither of them had deliberately planned. Daphne became Daph; Daph became daffodil; eventually daffodil became Flower. Both understood the other meaning it had acquired. The little prince had loved a flower too, a rose whose importance could not be accounted for by examining it as an ordinary specimen. Max had once mentioned the connection. Daphne had told him she knew, and asked whether he intended to explain every affectionate thing he did.

Now she sighed, and something in the sound was wrong. It seemed to break before it had finished leaving her. “I know you do,” she said. Her fingers tightened against his back. “I don’t want you to go.”

“It’s all right.” He drew back just enough to look at her and brushed his thumb along her cheek. “I’m not leaving for another three months. And I’ll be back before you know it.”

She shook against him. At first he thought she was laughing at the inadequacy of that promise. Then her breathing caught again, and she pressed her face into his chest with a force that frightened him. He put one hand behind her head.

“No, Max.” The words came unevenly. “You don’t understand.”

She lifted her face.

Blood marked her cheek. It had spread across her temple and gathered in the hair beside it, dark and wet. Max stared, unable to connect the sight with anything that had happened in the room. His thumb was still raised where he had touched her. He looked at it, then back at her face.

“Flower?” he said. The word barely reached her.

He loosened his hold and stepped backwards. Daphne watched him with an anguish that made the movement feel like abandonment. “Max, I want you to stay. Here. With me. With us.” Her voice shook. “I miss you. I miss you so much.”

Warmth spreads across his chest.

He looks down. His shirt is wet, the stain widening beneath the place where her face has rested. Blood travels through the fabric, following folds and seams, spreading farther than it should. He presses both hands against it. Something hurts beneath them. When he lifts his fingers, they are slick with red.

A hospital room begins to return to him. White light. Machinery beside a bed. Pressure in his throat. There is something he needs to do, something that matters more than being here, although he cannot yet remember why anything should matter more than this.

“I miss you, Max,” Daphne says. Tears move through the blood on her face. “I really don’t want you to wake up.”

“But I’m—” he begins, and pain takes the rest of the sentence.

His body arches. A violent contraction passes through him, followed by another sensation that seems to wrench him away from the place where he is standing. Air is driven into his lungs. The room brightens until he can no longer distinguish Daphne from the light around her. He tries to hold her face in sight, but voices enter from somewhere beyond it, urgent and close.

“He’s back. I have a pulse.”

Fluorescent lights glare above him. He is lying down. Alarms sound, overlapping with instructions he cannot follow, and figures in scrubs move around the bed. A doctor stands beside him with defibrillator paddles still in hand. Max watches somebody take them away, the practical movement carrying a significance his mind is not yet able to arrange.

His chest hurts with a depth that makes every smaller sensation difficult to locate. The breathing tube remains in his throat. He gags against it, weakly and without relief, while air enters according to a rhythm he has not chosen. Somebody notices that his eyes are open. A face moves into view and speaks to him, but Daphne’s face is still there behind it, and he cannot make enough room for both.

Tears run towards his temples and disappear into his hair. He cannot lift a hand to stop them. A moment ago Magnus was asleep beside him, the book was on the table, and Daphne was holding him because she did not want him to leave. The detail remains intolerably complete. He can still feel the weight of her head against his chest.

Was that a dream, or was that death?

His new heart stopped. He is certain of it now, although the certainty comes partly from the room around him and partly from somewhere he cannot examine. He has heard accounts of lives passing before people’s eyes, memories summoned in the last extremity of consciousness. This did not feel like watching his life. It felt like entering one particular moment and finding that the people inside it knew things the moment itself could not have contained.

His fingers close weakly against the sheet. Pain, medication, interrupted blood flow: there will be explanations available when he is capable of considering them. None can help him now. He needs to get out of this hospital. He needs to reach his laboratory and the QEC module. He needs to speak to Hermes.

Above everything else, he needs to know.