Free Prayers to Broken Stones by Dan Simmons

itself.”
    “And Goldmann’s theory does?”
    “It’s not really a theory yet, Gail. It was a new approach, using both recent work with holograms and a lineof analysis developed in the Thirties by a Russian mathematician. That’s where I was called in. It was pretty simple, really. Goldmann’s group was doing all sorts of complicated EEG studies and scans. I’d take their data, do a Fourier analysis of them, and then plug it all into various modifications of Schrödinger’s wave equation to see whether it worked as a standing wave.”
    “Jerry, I don’t see how this helps.”
    “Goddamn it, Gail, it
did
work. Human thought
can
be described as a standing wavefront. Sort of a superhologram. Or, maybe more precisely, a hologram containing a few million smaller holograms.”
    Gail was leaning forward. Even in the darkness Bremen could make out the frown lines of attention that appeared whenever he spoke to her of his work. Her voice came very softly. “Where does that leave the mind, Jerry … the brain?”
    It was his turn to frown slightly. “I guess the best answer is that the Greeks and the religious nuts were right to separate the two,” he said. “The brain could be viewed as kind of a … well, electrochemical generator and interferometer all in one. But the mind … ah, the
mind
is something a lot more beautiful than that lump of gray matter.” He was thinking in terms of equations, sine waves dancing to Schrödinger’s elegant tune.
    “So there
is
a soul that can survive death?” Gail asked. Her voice had taken on the slightly defensive, slightly querulous tone that always entered in when she discussed religious ideas.
    “Hell, no,” said Bremen. He was a little irritated at having to think in words once again. “If Goldmann was right and the personality is a complex wavefront, sort of a series of low-energy holograms interpreting reality, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The template would be destroyed as well as the holographic generator.”
    “So where does that leave us?” Gail’s voice was almost inaudible.
    Bremen leaned forward and took her hand. It was cold. “Don’t you see why I got interested in this whole lineof research? I thought it might offer a way of describing our … uh … ability.”
    Gail moved over and sat next to him in the broad, wooden chair. His arm went around her, and he could feel the cool skin of her upper arm. Suddenly a meteorite lanced from the zenith to the south, leaving the briefest of retinal echoes.
    “And?” Gail’s voice was very soft.
    “It’s simple enough,” said Bremen. “When you visualize human thought as a series of standing wavefronts creating interference patterns that can be stored and propagated in holographic analogs, it begins to make sense.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “It
does.
It means that for some reason our minds are resonant not only to wave patterns that we initiate but to transforms that others generate.”
    “Yes,” said Gail, excited now, gripping his hand tightly. “Remember when we shared impressions of the talent just after we met? We both decided that it would be impossible to explain mindtouch to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. It would be like describing colors to a blind person …” She halted and looked around her.
    “Okay,” said Bremen. “Robby. When I contacted him, I tapped into a closed system. The poor kid had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world. What little information he did have was mostly painful. So for sixteen years he had happily gone about building his own universe. My mistake was in underestimating, hell, never even
thinking
about, the power he might have in that world. He grabbed me, Gail. And with me, you.”
    The wind came up a bit and moved the leaves of the orchard. The soft rustling had a sad, end-of-summer sound to it.
    “All right,” she said after a while, “that explains how
you
got here. How about me? Am I a figment