I knew there was something uncommon about Hannay soon after I walked through her door. One whole wall of Ms. Anholonomy's parlor glittered with unbroken grey metallic sheen. Spangled light careened off uncountable oddly-shaped inch tiles, dispersed by tenth millimeter facets, and was shaped by the greater pattern into shifting fivefold spicules of burnished illumination.
It was seemingly absurd. No Euclidian plane may be tessellated with fivefold symmetry, not by tiles of a single shape. I drew closer and recognized the kites and darts of a Penrose tiling. They snuggled together, the convex parallelopiped kites nestling into the dented darts to create a pseudo-fivefold symmetry perfectly overlaying the zero curvature surface as an ungapped blanket. Global regularity emerged from local irregularity. What was Hannay's angle? It was a two-space pun. Anholonomy is a force of nature!
Those myriad facets on each tile's face, all crossing at right angles, were a wonder to behold. The ordered reflectance was an astounding simulacrum of the Widmanstätten pattern. I imagined eons over which genuine interdigitated kamacite and taenite slowly grow within zero-g molten nickel-iron masses, undistorted by any but the weakest of gravity's seductive embraces. Metallic meteorites are sectioned and etched to disclose their authentic origin. No Earthly process - limited by evanescent human lives and dirtied by gravity - can produce such a motif. An artisan had invested remarkable exertions. No two tiles were identical, though all were consistent, as if slabs had been sequentially sliced from a single huge crystalline body, diced, etched, and the tiles thereafter crafted to perfect shape. Had it been real, that metallic panel would fetch a score times its weight in gold.
I had a pocket compass. I ran it along the wall, tracing gossamer magnetic lines of force, quantum mechanical threads passing through aligned unpaired electron spins sequestered within the 3d-orbitals of each metal atom. As the Widmanstätten pattern dictated atomic alignment and the Penrose tiling enforced macroscopic order, so the summed magnetic force field bent to the mandate of the assembled wall. How clever, how diabolic, how perfect, how ironic was her interior decoration?
Spins are anti-paired in their lowest energy state, like two magnets glued together by their opposed north and south poles touching. Consider a triangle of spins. The first is oriented up or down, the second is anti-oriented down or up, and the third one points...? This is called spin frustration, and it gives rise to bizarre quantum mechanical nuances beyond the discrete computational or even symbolic encapsulations of our most profound scholars. Maxwell's Equations embody strong opinions about successful closure, hence magnetic monopoles' absence within our universe.
I ran my compass in a wide loop. The wall exhibited fivefold global symmetry, eh? What would happen when my compass returned to its starting point, forced to point both north and south simultaneously? Would the universe disappear lest it be caught in an irresolvable conundrum of its own making?
No, I did. The wall bloated in a most peculiar way. Aharonov, Bohm, and Casher stared up from Hell, giggling. The wall relaxed. Closure was complete. Sometimes life is the berries. Face it; sometimes it ain't. I was Elsewhere.
The Middle Ages hosted a deluge of consecrated muddle. Every manner of divinity appeared everywhere to everyone sufficiently addled or voracious to ply the crowd. The 20th Century suffers a paucity of holy materializations given videotape and science, though the occasional Christ does appear browned onto a taco, along with Elvis. Today we enjoy UFOs and the ubiquitous huge-eyed, large-headed, weak-jawed, five-fingered, and otherwise dainty alien entity. What gods we abandon our own fervid baby hallucinations restore.
Their eyes were set way too far up upon their arching convex foreheads, and too far apart, facing straight forward in shallow depressions. Their noses were vestigial snouts, moist and black, perched upon thick, brownish skin. Their ears were small acoustic horns, also set high in the black and greying pelts of their heads. Their jaws and teeth hinted carnivorous ancestors. Each hand sprouted a pair of asymmetric thumbs separated by a span of four fingers - toolmakers. Two meter gracile forms were abundant, whispering among themselves. Shorter more robust forms stood closer. Their heavy fingers were like hydraulic clamps, the upper surfaces heavily calloused and sprouting stout, superficial thorns. I suspected some ancient avatar stirred his species' evolution, creating castes suited to the task, and to tasks outside my knowing.
They were both displeased and pleased. The foreign animal began to scream.... Its post-prandial residue finally bequeathed godspeed to residual microbial appetites.