A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  The only reason he was so successful with girls was that until he fell in love with someone else, he bent all his impressive intellect on the current girl. He would study her so intently that she thought he understood her soul… and then he’d lose interest before she had a chance to realize that he was that intense about everything in his field of view, and she wasn’t so special after all.

  If he’d been chasing this Annelise long enough for her to discover that he was exactly as interested in the appearance of a Mesopotamian box turtle in central Texas as he was in her soul, she was probably a lost cause for him. Ingrid and I would just have to listen until some new planet swam into his ken, or –

  “Ben.” I jerked my chin towards the Student Union. Vern Trexler was coming this way, and we were sitting ducks unless – “Can you do your camouflage thing right now?”

  I was unaccustomed to being within the field of someone else’s visualization; generally I was the one creating the visualization, not a ride-along. From my perspective, being included under Ben’s protective cover felt like being in a time-lapse video of a blue norther sweeping down on Austin. The sky darkened over us and the sounds of people outside the cover faded away. The air around us took on a strange consistency, almost like clear Jello, blurring our surroundings to my sight. On a sunny May afternoon in Texas, I felt chilled and the little hairs on my arms prickled.

  By the pricking of my thumbs… But it was only Ben thinking about open subsets of our background. Wasn’t it?

  The unnatural chill invaded the water around Niiqarquusu and shocked him out of his lazy, sun-baked dreaming. Here was a working worthy of the Magi of the Medes, nothing so trivial as a hand grabbing for his shell. What had caused this? The water seemed almost solid around him, the light died. He lifted his head and searched for the source of the disturbance. Light warped and twisted in ways he had not seen in… how long had it been? He could barely count the centuries. He tried to call to this new mage and the ring binding his neck tightened, burned, absorbed his strength. The Lights were buried deep within him and the ring kept them, too, asleep. Niiqarquusu woke to a bitter awareness of his diminished powers. Bound as he was, he could not influence this strange wizardry of lines and planes in the slightest. He could only exercise the common defense of his kind. Frustrated and frightened, Niiqarquusu tucked in his head and limbs and pulled the two parts of his shell together until he resembled a rock.

  Some distance south of the university, the man who called himself Raven felt a quivering in the air of his office. The chill that briefly surrounded the Turtle Pond had no impact on this air-conditioned building, but there was a disturbance in the air, a shaking of the light that was both familiar and strange. Familiar, because he had felt similar workings before; strange, because it seemed to be based on a cold geometry rather than on any warm, living animals.

  He summoned his blue-black feathered servant, Lamashtu, and gave her instructions.

  The light and heat of a normal late spring afternoon rushed back as Ben drew a long, shaky breath. Vern had walked past us; no one around the Turtle Pond seemed perturbed. I supposed they had been as blind to Ben’s work as I had been that morning, when I was on the outside of Camouflage.

  “You have got to show me how you do that!”

  He started to speak, but was drowned out by harsh voices crying, “Gack! Gack!” A flurry of black feathers darted down, snatched the last of his sandwich and left a whitish splotch on the edge of the pond.

  “Blast it! A cackling of grackles,” he said. “I hate this time of year… We might as well get back to the office; I can’t concentrate on anything when I’m worried about grackles shitting on my head.”

  Chapter 4

  When we got back to Allandale House there was another stranger in the break room: a tall skinny redhead with nerdy glasses, whom Lensky was regarding with a self-satisfied smile. I would have been willing to Möbius right past the stranger so that Ben and I could get down to details on Camouflage, but Ben made the mistake of asking about him.

  “Folks,” Lensky said with a sweeping gesture, “allow me to introduce James DiGrazio –“

  “Jimmy,” the redhead said, “James is my-father-the-CEO.”

  “Jimmy DiGrazio, computer analyst extraordinaire, who has generously volunteered to educate you on the fundamentals of computer architecture.”

  So much for that afternoon’s research. Jimmy started talking almost before Lensky stopped. After the third sentence I got a legal pad out of the cabinet and started taking notes and drawing pictures.

  We had a momentary respite when Ingrid joined us; Jimmy’s overlapping sentences and rush of words slowed, then stopped while he took in everything from her coronet of pale braids to the D-cups under her white shirt. The usual reaction.

  “Jimmy,” Lensky hissed, and the lecture slowly restarted. (What, you think he couldn’t hiss a word with no fricatives? Spooks get special training in this sort of thing.)

  Getting Jimmy from comprehensible generalities to the kind of nuts and bolts we needed wasn’t easy. As soon as he got into details he became incomprehensible, and we wasted a lot of time translating computerese into mathematics only to discover that these particular details weren’t the ones we needed.

  “It might help,” he suggested after the fourth or fifth such detour, “if you told me exactly what you needed to know.”

  Lensky scoffed. “If they could do that, they wouldn’t need you!”

  “Well… what exactly do you want to do?”

  Ben tried to talk around it and only shed clouds of obfuscation. Ingrid couldn’t help; every time she opened her mouth the computer nerd goggled at her and quit thinking. I wound up stuck with the job, and inadvertently revealed a bit more detail than we really wanted to share with anyone outside the Center.

  “So,” he summed up. “You’re thinking of some way to change interior states of a computer without authorization and without being physically present. What do you think, computers are magical?”

  “Don’t overstate the case,” Ben said hastily. “There are lots of ways to change the state of a computer without being in the same room. Isn’t that basically what hackers do?”

  “Yes, but you’re not asking me about networking and remote connections. You’re not asking how to make the changes, you’re asking what changes need to be made. Obviously you’re not telling me everything. And I’m not going to play until you do.”

  “We’ll have to get authorization from our boss…”

  Lensky interrupted. “I’ll authorize him. Get on with it.”

  I had already slipped up, and the man was incapable of keeping his brain in gear when Ingrid spoke, so it was up to Ben to explain as little as possible about our research.

  He might have done that a little too well; Jimmy looked confused and dissatisfied.

  “We manipulate objects in real space via mathematical visualization,” I summarized.

  “You do magic?” His voice went up on the last word.

  “You’re not freaked out?”

  “No, why would I be?”

  “Then you must not believe me.” Another recruit for the “Thalia Kostis is crazy” club.

  “I believe you think you’re telling the truth. And I believe you’re delusional.”

  “Good, humor me. Tell the deluded mathematicians here how to force remote access to a computer behind a firewall.”

  Jimmy chalked some diagrams on the whiteboard. “If you could directly affect internal registers, which you can’t, you’d want to flip the states of this… this… and this. Probably.”

  “Maybe it’s as simple as a Jordan Curve problem,” I said. “No way to that side of the plane…”

  “Let C be a simple closed curve,” Ben said.

  “And let AB be an arc of C,” Ingrid contributed.

  “Delete AB from C, and there is now only one side of the plane,” I finished.

  The last drawing on the whiteboard fell off, leaving its section of board pri
stine and gleaming. You could just make out the inked diagram, now draped over the molding at the floor. Jimmy’s eyes got wide. “You set that up, didn’t you?”

  “Set what up? It didn’t work,” Ben said. He sounded frustrated.

  Jimmy picked up the deleted diagram, a tenuous shape formed from tiny splodges of ink. It wrapped itself around his forearm. “This is for real, isn’t it?”

  “If I say yes,” Ben said cautiously, “are you going to run away screaming?”

  “Hell no! You couldn’t beat me off with a stick! Real magic? This is so cool! Way better than World of Wizardry or Nebulosity.”

  Ingrid rolled her eyes.

  I couldn’t think around Jimmy DiGrazio with his ebullient enthusiasm for what he imagined our research to be. Neither could Ben. Ingrid claimed, later, not to be affected by the man’s presence, but she was the first one to retreat to the privacy of our offices on the far side of the wall. We left Lensky the job of explaining how we’d turned sideways and vanished (Möbius-ing to the other side looks very strange to onlookers). It seemed only fair; after all, he’d brought the guy here in the first place.

  And with all of us safely on this side of the wall, Lensky couldn’t even get at us to complain about the arrangement.

  “Okay, so it’s not a Jordan Curve problem,” Ben muttered. “I wonder…”

  His eyes got even vaguer than usual and he wandered off to his own office, mumbling. Ingrid and I split up without any discussion at all. It had been exhausting, trying to get the information we needed out of Jimmy; all three of us badly needed some time in a normal environment.

  (You don’t think being alone in an office, drawing diagrams on a whiteboard, is normal? Look, you don’t have to be introverted to the point of mania to be a mathematician, but it’s a good start. Even being around Ben and Ingrid for too long was tiring, and they felt the same way about me. Being around a bouncy type like Jimmy DiGrazio was exhausting.)

  Dr. Verrick yanked us out of our cocoons, I mean offices, before any of us were even half recovered from all that interaction. He wanted reports, and he wanted to discuss staffing. The spook was leaning on him for results and the Allandale House trustees were unhappy about the way we were using the third floor – or rather, the way we weren’t using it.

  “I’ve wasted half a day trying to persuade the trustees that we are making good and appropriate use of our space here,” he announced as soon as we filed into the coffee room. From habit, I glanced at the tray under the “These Are Doughnuts” sign. Still empty. “I don’t want to have another such meeting.”

  “What’s their complaint?” Ingrid asked. “They said we could have this floor for office space. We have offices. They take up space.”

  “By their accounting, three and a half people don’t need the entire floor.” Dr. Verrick looked as if he expected us to go forth and multiply on the spot. “We have the funding to hire more people; we need to use it. If we don’t put more warm bodies here, they’ve threatened to make us share the floor with someone else.”

  “That’s not exactly a fate worse than death,” Ben said. “As long as we don’t have to share the Research Division space…”

  Dr. Verrick looked ill. “The Office for Diversity Compliance was mentioned. As a possible co-tenant.”

  I felt ill. So, to judge from the silence, did Ingrid and Ben.

  “It’s not just a matter of funds,” I pointed out eventually. “There just aren’t that many visualizing topologists around. And even if we could find more, they might have lives.” I could appreciate – as a theoretical matter – that some people might prefer real life to bouncing around the top floor of a Victorian house with misfits like us.

  “Not really a problem,” Ben drawled. “Anybody who can visualize well enough to join us is unlikely to have a life.”

  Ingrid and I objected. “Fine,” he said, “come up with a counterexample. Who here has a real life?”

  We thought.

  “You have sequential girlfriends,” I pointed out.

  “They don’t last. That’s more of an attempt at a life.”

  We brooded a little more, under Dr. Verrick’s expectant gaze.

  “I had to pay a late fee on my library books last week,” Ingrid said eventually.

  There was a momentary silence.

  “We don’t have to hire more Research Fellows,” Dr. Verrick said finally. “The need for support staff has been mentioned. In this very room.”

  “A receptionist….” Ingrid sighed happily.

  “Someone to make the coffee.”

  “Bring doughnuts.”

  “Take messages.”

  “Find one who won’t have a nervous breakdown within a day of starting work here, and I’ll hire her,” Dr. Verrick said. “Him. It. Xer. Whatever.”

  He did know how to squash an idea flat. “In the meantime,” he went on as soon as we seemed adequately squashed, “Mr. DiGrazio will join us as a consultant. He’ll have an office - outside the Research Division,” he added before we could start complaining, “and will make himself available to answer your questions about computer architecture.”

  “Jimmy,” Ingrid said flatly.

  “Could be worse,” Ben said. “He’s not exactly an extrovert.”

  Ingrid sniffed. “You could have fooled me.”

  “World of Wizardry? Nebulosity?”

  “You know what those are?”

  “I looked them up,” Ben said. “They’re online role-playing games. That’s how he spends his free time. It’s not exactly social.”

  It was a bit more social than any of us liked to be, but I did take his point. “He’s like us in that he has virtually no life.”

  “Or,” Ingrid suggested, “you could say that he has a life… virtually.”

  Ben did seem to be able to deal with Jimmy better than Ingrid and I. He took his copy of the suspicious-messages folder and the name Lensky had provided and actually invited the computer nerd into his office for a bit of experimentation. “At least I don’t have to conceal what I’m doing from Jimmy,” he pointed out. “That makes this a lot better than having to be around normal people.”

  Ingrid and I looked at each other. “Do you think Ben might be a trifle… extroverted?”

  “He does attract girls. That’s more than you can say for either of us.”

  “Speak for yourself, Lia. I don’t want to attract girls!”

  “No more do I. I was speaking generally, and you know it. Besides,” I dug in the sharp point, “now we know what you attract… computer nerds!”

  “No way. Clean out your mind.” She stalked out of my office.

  The only noticeable result of Ben’s experimentation was that his hair looked even more like a disheveled haystack than usual. I deduced that he’d been running his fingers through it for most of the two hours he’d spent with Jimmy.

  “No results?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I can actually mess with nearby computers to a certain extent.”

  “What are you using?”

  “A variant on Ingrid’s mapping trick. But I think I need to be physically closer to the computer Lensky wants us to target. He didn’t even give us an address, but my range right now is more like ten feet and I’m pretty sure Crowson’s computer isn’t in this building.”

  “Um. How do you know that? About your range, I mean.”

  Ingrid stamped into my office and answered the question. Sort of. “Ben, get your tiny mind out of my laptop! Did you think I couldn’t feel you messing around in my folders?”

  Ben gave me a sickly grin. “That’s how I know.”

  Lensky was lying in wait when we headed out for food. “Any success?”

  Ben repeated that he needed to be closer.

  “I’ll have an address for you tomorrow.”

  Ingrid and Ben headed out, but Lensky lingered. “Did you need something?” I said. I didn’t care for the idea of leaving him alone in Allandale House to do whatever spooky spy-type stuff he wa
s used to.

  “Thought I might buy you a beer,” he said, following me down the stairs.

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know… clear the air, improve diplomatic relations… apology? I did come across kind of crude this morning. That really isn’t usual; I don’t know what came over me.”

  What I mainly remembered about that morning was blowing up at him.

  “Oh, well. I think we’re even. I seem to recall throwing a few insults your way.”

  “Then you can buy me a beer.”

  “On a Research Fellow’s stipend? Dream on!”

  “I was hoping to establish friendlier terms. Is that even remotely possible?”

  “I don’t know. Are you going to stop being patronizing about my research?”

  “I don’t know,” he parroted back at me. “Are you going to stop being patronizing about everybody in the world who isn’t a mathematician?”

  “I’m not!”

  “Oh, yes you are.”

  “You’re thinking of Ingrid, she’s the snob.”

  We’d reached the parking lot and I was beginning to wonder what to do next. I’d automatically set out towards the west of campus because that was where my parents lived. But I didn’t live there any more; Ingrid and I shared an apartment north of the university, where there were still old buildings that hadn’t been replaced by luxury condominiums..

  “All three of you are insufferable intellectual snobs,” Lensky said. The annoying thing was, he sounded as if he thought that was funny.

  “Okay, I won’t prolong your suffering in my company. Good night!”

  “Are you offended?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Well, that gets us back to me having to buy you a beer, doesn’t it? Come on.”

  He would have one of the coveted and strictly limited FDP parking permits. His car was the closest air-conditioned space available.