THE HIGHER SPACE by Jamil Nasir © July 1996

EQUATION OF LIFE . . . AND DEATH

     Bob got up and puttered restlessly around his dark bedroom. He felt strangley distant from everything, isolated, as if the second floor of his own home were a space station orbiting far out in dark regions. He went and looked out each window on the floor in turn, trying to spot FBI agents. In charcoal-gray suburban darkness he saw the side of the Lehrer's house next door; his own shadowed backyard through a crisscross of branches; the peak of the Ranellis' house with telephone wires; and the street, framed in more branches, with a splash of greenish streetlight, cars parked along the curb. The four corners of Bob Wilson's life. Take them away and what would you have? Or drop Bob Wilson into a place where there were no streets or trees at all, no houses or neighbors or cars, only a "phase space" where equations standing for those things swirled, and what would you have? A world where you could do anything you wanted by changing an equation? Was that this world?

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HIGH-TECH MAGIC

     Bob Wilson is a lawyer with a house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, and a predictable life. Then he agrees to represent a neighborhood couple in what looks like an open-and-shut custody case. But no sooner do the Wilsons take in fourteen-year-old Diana Esterbrook than Bob must ask himself some troubling questions. Is Diana a computer genius . . . or a dangerously disturbed adolescent? Why is his house being bugged? Who is the mysterious man in black? And what about Diana's birth mother, a convicted kidnapper just released from prison? Wilson's quest for answers will lead him to an enigmatic private detective, a meek professor with dreams of immortality, and finally to the secrets of a discipline called Thaumatomathematics a strange blend of magic and science where death becomes the key to beatific ecstasy.