Babylon and Other Stories by Alix Ohlin

not ten yards from the store. She threw a tarp over the mail and, gunning the engine, glanced back at it.She never opened his mail, although he sometimes asked her to, and anyway he opened it in front of her, showed or told her everything—he had no secrets, he always said. But these were her scruples. The boat skittered a little as she maneuvered around driftwood. On the other side of the lake a motorboat roared and circled. Underneath it and closer in, a smaller sound almost evaporated as it reached her: the hoot of a loon.
    Carson came into the kitchen, where she was snapping beans. He dipped his hand into the bowl and sat down at the table with a handful. “She wants to come here,” he said.
    “Here? Why?”
    “Because she knows I won't go to the city.”
    She turned. His legs under the table stretched the length of it: he was over six feet tall, strong-shouldered, rangy. Long fingers with thick knuckles, like knots on wood. To relax he built furniture, including this table.
    “To work on the book,” he said.
    “I thought she already did.” Claire set the bowl in the sink and ran water over the beans. “Isn't that what came today, the edits?”
    “She says we have a lot more to do. That the book isn't quite coming across. She thinks a few days of hammering it out in person could do it. So, can she come?”
    “You're asking me?”
    “It's your place,” he said.
    She looked at him. She loosed a clove of garlic from its paper and set it, along with an onion, on the table for him to chop.
    Carson studied entropy. Claire didn't understand his work and had given up trying. It was entirely theoretical, divorced from the data sets and experimental designs on which he had built hisearly career in chemistry. He produced it, as far as she could tell, whole and unprecedented, a rabbit from the black hat of his mind. Sitting in his office at the back of the cottage, he wrote page after page of thoughts with a blue marker on lined yellow pads. What she knew of entropy came from a college textbook that she'd bought, in a vain effort to educate herself, after they met. Entropy is a thermodynamic function measuring the disorder of a system. The greater the disorder of a system, the higher its entropy. Disorder equals randomness.
    Or it used to, until Carson came along. He developed a new way of looking at entropy, of evaluating the whole idea of order and equilibrium. He charted the paths of molecules through systems and began to wonder if entropy veered toward simplicity, if there was order within disorder, whether disorder had a quality of inevitability to it and was, in fact, the lawful tendency of a non-equilibrial universe. Possibly, Claire thought, entropy was a scientific term for fate. But she never said so to Carson, who would tell her gently that science was science, not metaphor.
    At the beginning, in the city, he'd tried to explain the model to her, defining its basic elements, then moving on and almost immediately losing her, his logic twisting along a corridor she could not follow. He drew outlines, equations, the universe in boxes and arrows. The blanker she looked, the faster he talked, reaching into his brain for examples to teach her by, striving to share his clarity. He stretched his hands wide, carving the air: his words a map to show her where he was. Claire was no scientist at all—simply a freelance designer who'd failed math in high school. Instead of listening to his words she became distracted by the passion in his voice, the shaking timbre of it, by how he peered under the surface of things to discover some elusive knowledge of the world. She forgot to pay attention, and attraction overruled. Eventually, they both gave up on explanations.
    She had known Carson for a year when he published the first diagram of his model in
Science
and was suddenly acclaimed in the nonscientific press. Scientists made pilgrimages to his office at the university, besieged him with letters, never stopped calling. Some