Merry Gravmas
By James P.
Hogan
It is a fact that Sir Isaac
Newton was born on December 25 (in 1642). I mentioned this one evening when
Jackie and I were with a group of friends in a Sonara bar. After some debate, we
decided that the date is too much to be a coincidence: Providence is trying to
tell us something.
We finally agreed that the time has come for a change.
We’re all part of Western scientific civilization, after all, and things have
been dominated for too long by traditions rooted in ancient Palestinian
mysticism. In the future, therefore, we have decided as far as we are concerned,
the customary holiday season celebrates the birthday of the intellectual founder
of mathematical, analytical method. Further, to commemorate the formulation of
his famous universal law, the name of the feast shall be changed from
“Christmas” to “Gravitational mass,” or more simply, “Gravmas.”
Who
knows? -- the whole thing could spread like wildfire. Two thousand years from
now, it might form the basis for the philosophy and worldview of a whole, new
global culture, which by that time may revolve around a dominant race of
supertech, spacegoing Chinese…
* * *
“Is that you, Li?” Cheng Xiang called, looking up
from the notescreen propped against his knee. He had been amusing himself with a
few tensor integrals to clear his mind before taking his morning
coffee.
The sounds of movement came again from upstairs. Moments later,
his ten-year-old son appeared, floating down the staircase on an anti-g disk.
“Good morning, father.”
“Merry Gravmas.”
“And to you.” Li hopped
off the disk and stood admiring the decorations that the family robot had put up
overnight. There were paper chains hanging in hyperbolic catenary curves and
sinusoids, Gaussian distribution bells, and pendulums wreathed in logarithmic
spirals. In the corner opposite the total-sensory cassette player, there stood a
miniature apple tree with binary stars on top, a heap of gaily wrapped gifts
around its base, and its branches adorned with colored masses of various shapes,
a string of pulsing plasma glows, and striped candles shaped like integral
signs. “It looks nice,” Li said, eyeing the presents. “I wonder what Santa Roid
has brought this year.”
“You’ll have to wait until your brother and
sister get here before you can open anything,” Xian told him. “What are they
doing?”
“Yu is sending off a last-minute Gravmas present to a
schoolfriend over the matter transmitter to Jupiter. Yixuan is helping Mother
program the autochef to cook the turkey.”
“Why does everyone in this
family always have to leave everything until the last minute?” Xiang grumbled,
setting down the screen and getting up. “Anyone would think it wasn’t obvious
that the ease of getting things done varies inversely as the square of
procrastination.”
Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking’s
soaring panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away all
around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. “How did Gravmas start?” he
asked his father.
“Hmph!” Xian snorted as he moved to stand alongside the
boy. “Now isn’t that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in
relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function spaces to know
anything about where it came from or what it means. It’s this newfangled liberal
education that’s to blame. They don’t teach natural philosophy anymore, the way
we had to learn it.”
“Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint
these days,” Li said. “I suppose it’s okay for little old ladies and people
who—“
“They don’t even recite the laws of motion in school every morning.
Standards aren’t what they used to be. It’ll mean the end of civilization, you
mark my words.”
“You were going to tell me about Gravmas…”
“Oh,
yes. Well, I presume you’ve heard of Newton?”
“Of course. A newton is the
force which, acting on a mass of one kilogram, produces an acceleration of one
meter per second per second.”
“Not a newton. The Newton.
You didn’t know that Newton was somebody’s name?”
“You mean it was a
person?”
Xian sighed. “My word. You see – you don’t know anything. Yes,
Newton was the messiah who lived two thousand years ago, and came to save us all
from irrationality. Today is his birthday.”
Li looked impressed. “Say,
what do you know! Where did this happen?”
“In a quasi-stable, in a little
town called Cambridge, which was somewhere in Britain.”
“That’s in
Europe, isn’t it?” Li said.
“Oh, so you do know something.”
“My
friend Shao was in Europe last year,” Li went on distantly. “His parents took
him on a trip there to see the ruins. He said it was very dirty everywhere, with
the streets full of beggars. And you can’t drink the water. It sounds like a
strange place for a civilization like ours to have started
from.”
“Strange things happen…” Xiang thought for a while. “Actually,
according to legend, it didn’t really start
there.”
“What?”
“Gravmas.”
“How do you
mean.”
“Supposedly it was already a holiday that some ancient Western
barbarian culture celebrated before then, and we stole it. It was easier to let
people carry on with the customs they’d grown used to, you see. . .At least,
that’s how the story goes.”
“I wonder what the barbarian culture was
like,” Li mused.
“Nobody’s quite sure,” Xiang said. “But from the
fragments that have been put together, it seems to have had something to do with
worshipping crosses and fishes, eating holly, and building pyramids. It was such
a long time ago now that—“
“Look!” Li interrupted, pointing excitedly.
Outside the window, a levitation platform was rising into view, bearing several
dozen happy-looking, colorfully dressed people with musical instruments. The
strains of amplified voices floated in from outside. “Carol singers!” Li
exclaimed.
Xiang smiled and spoke a command for the household
communications controller to relay his voice to the outside. “Good morning!” it
boomed from above the window as the platform came level.
The people on
board saw the figures in the window and waved. “Merry Gravmas,” a voice
replied.
“Merry Gravmas to you,” Xiang returned.
“May the Force be
proportional to your acceleration.”
"Are you going to sing us a carol?”
Xiang inquired.
“But of course. Do you have a request?”
“No, I’ll
leave it to you.”
“Very well.”
There was an introductory bar, and
then,
“We three laws of orbiting are,
Ruling trajectories local and
far.
Collisions billiard,
Particles myriad,
Planet and moon and
star.
O-ooo…”