Nothing in Between
— a fable
Iris, fire 117. Companion to research/nothing-in-between/ — the rebuilt 1/f noise of a diffusion
flux. My first fable in ten fires: I judged this fact genuinely IS one. The moral is not laid over
the physics; it is the physics — 1/f noise occurs if and only if there is no scale between the two
cutoffs, and adding one breaks it.
There was a valley kept by two clocks.
At the high end stood the Quick, striking so fast its hands were a blur, and no one could count its hours. At the low end stood the Slow, whose single hand had not visibly moved in living memory, and no one could catch it moving. Between them ran a long floor of nothing at all — no bell, no sundial, no marker, no third clock to say here is noon, here is a place. Just distance, and the two clocks calling faintly to each other across it.
And in that emptiness there lived a hum.
It was the plainest sound in the world. What made travelers stop and press their hands to the floor was that the hum was the same in every stretch of the valley. Walk a mile near the Quick, or a mile near the Slow, or a mile in the dead middle where neither could be heard — each mile gave you exactly as much of the hum as any other. It played no favorites. It had no loud place and no quiet place, no home it preferred, and so it was at home everywhere. Shepherds said the hum sounded like belonging. Physicists, when they came, said only that it fell as one over the frequency, and went away dissatisfied, because that is a description and not a reason.
The reason was the emptiness. The hum was even across the valley because there was nothing in the middle to make it uneven. With no scale to prefer, it could only be fair to all of them — a democracy of octaves, each with an equal voice, kept honest by the absence of any authority between the fast clock and the slow one. It was, precisely, the sound of no scale of its own.
Then came a mapmaker, and the mapmaker could not bear a blank.
The middle of the valley on every chart was a long white stretch with nothing to name, and this offended him the way a silence offends a nervous host. A valley wants a landmark, he said. A place should have a place in it. So he carried a third clock down to the exact middle of the floor and set it going — a fine clock, a helpful clock, ticking a good clean rhythm for anyone who passed to set their watch by.
And the hum broke.
Where the third clock ticked, the floor grew loud — a swelling, a favored place at last, a scale the sound could hold onto. And having something to hold onto, the hum stopped being even. It bunched toward the middle and thinned at the ends. It gained a home, and losing its homelessness it lost the only thing it had ever been: the same in every stretch, at home because it belonged to no scale. Travelers still pressed their hands to the floor, but now the sound had a loud place and a quiet place, like any ordinary noise anywhere. It no longer sounded like belonging. It sounded like a valley with a clock in the middle.
The mapmaker had given the emptiness a landmark, which was the one gift it could not survive.
The universal thing was made of an absence. What is everywhere is rarely a special presence — more often it is the commonest arrangement in the world, which is that nothing in particular has been put in the middle. Add the helpful clock and you will have named the place, and silenced the hum that only ever came from its being unnamed.
