A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  Meadow sneered. “Mathematicians? You people think that if you prove something must exist, that’s the same as holding it in your hot little hand. I don’t need any theoretical proofs that a multi-functional controller is possible, thank you.”

  “Well, actually,” Ben said in a soft, apologetic voice, “I am holding a multi-functional controller in my hand – well, in this box.” He set it on the lab bench in front of Meadow. “Our only concern is that your snake bodies may not be sophisticated enough to make the best use of the controller."

  “And what would you know about it? Show me.” Meadow pulled the tabs holding the box closed.

  Looked inside.

  Screamed and threw the box away from her.

  Ben dived to catch it and tripped over a metal snake body. The box hit the floor, turned over once, and spilled Mr. M. onto the tiles.

  Mr. M. began telling us what he thought of this careless treatment. At least, that’s what I thought he was telling us. He seemed to have reverted to ancient Babylonian.

  “I tried to warn you,” Ben told Meadow. He uncurled his body, separated himself from what was now an oddly shaped piece of scrap metal, and stood up rubbing what was probably going to be a goose egg on his forehead.

  “That. Was. Not. Funny!” Meadow announced. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at, bringing a [fornicating] piece of road kill into my [incestuous fornicating] lab, all wrapped up like a pretty little [blasphemous fornicating] present? You and your friends can all go and [perform anatomically impossible acts].”

  It’s not wise to piss off somebody with the personality of a bulldozer.

  Fortunately, Mr. M. decided to stop expressing himself in dead languages and save the day.

  “Dama más elegante y hermosa, por favor perdónanos para este choque.”

  Meadow stared at all of us. Nobody’s lips were moving.

  “Okay, who’s the Spanish-language ventriloquist?”

  Ingrid picked up the box, patted the red silk scarf down, and gently replaced Mr. M. Then she held him out to Meadow – at a safe distance, this time, but close enough that she could see his beak moving.

  “No tenia intención de mis amigos de sorprenderle.”

  “Oh. Oh, wow.” Meadow sat down at the lab bench. “It looks so real. And how did you program it to do that?”

  “Young person, I am real,” said Mr. M., reverting to English and to his usual state of high dudgeon. “And if “program” has a meaning similar to “command,” allow me to inform you that no one commands me. In the terms of your theology, you might say that I have free will and agency.”

  “And it talks as fancy as Father Hernandez on a tear,” Meadow marveled. ”Where did you get it?”

  “Ummm… long story,” I said. Most of it not exactly calculated to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. “The thing is, his body has been destroyed, and it’s kind of our fault, so we promised to fix him up with a new one.”

  “Why come to me? Plenty of turtles in the pond.”

  “Decapitating another turtle to save this one,” Ben said, “would only perpetuate the cycle of abuse. Now, about those snakebots…”

  “I’ve never even thought about the problem of connecting living neural tissue with the ‘bot controls. The technical problems alone…”

  Good, she was starting to think like an engineer again. Mr. M.’s head had been upgraded from “icky body part” to “engineering challenge.”

  “You do not have to solve this problem alone,” Mr. M. said. “Some of your problems, I surmise, stem from the difficulty of connecting two non-sentient systems with no warning if you make a mistake. I, being not only sentient but highly sapient, will be in a position to provide information – I believe you call it ‘feedback’ – on each step in the process. You will, of course, first set up a system of mirrors so that I can see the parts you are joining.”

  “That’s going to be a PITA,” Meadow said.

  “It will not be trivially easy. But since you, unlike most mortals, are capable of calculating angles of refraction in your head, that part of the problem should not be overly difficult.”

  Good old Mr. M! He knew how to flatter her.

  Meadow sent us out to buy some nice plain rectangular mirrors and some museum tacky goop to attach them with. “Yes, all of you. Except for Mr. M. here. He and I need to work through some technical details.” Her eyes got that unfocused look. “Did I just say I wanted to have a technical discussion with a dead turtle? Am I going crazy or what?”

  “You do not appear to be insane, but I fear that your memory is failing,” Mr. M. informed her. “I have already told you that I am not dead.”

  “Talking to a severed head in whatever condition is proof of insanity,” Meadow said.

  We skedaddled and left Mr. M. to soothe her.

  Ingrid and Jimmy opted not to return, pointing out that Ms. Melendez appeared to get more irritable the more people she had to deal with, and furthermore Ben and I had started this whole thing and we were the ones who ought to see it through.

  I had queasy visions of being handed a hemostat with a nerve or a blood vessel or something clamped in it, and being told to attach it to exactly the right one of a bunch of thin metal wires that all looked alike.

  I never found out if that was how the operation actually went, and that was perfectly all right with me. Meadow used us to hold mirrors until she got the angles right, and then she fixed them in place and ordered us out again.

  “Wait,” Mr. M. said. “Thalia, we will require some of the Lights.”

  I really needed to figure out a better way to carry those things. I pulled a handful out of my pocket and released them into the room. Mr. M. said a few words in, I guess, Babylonian, and the little dancing lights divided into two clusters, one at the back of his neck and one at the place where a controller and camera should have been attached to the snake body.

  Meadow took a deep, shaky breath. “Riiiight. We have talking animal parts and a performing firefly circus. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  “That’s about it,” Ben said. Well, it was true enough; we didn’t want to tell her about telekinesis, teleportation, and invisibility.

  “Good. Now go away. I’ll tell you when I’m through.”

  Our only part in the procedure was sitting on the floor on either side of the lab door and persuading various disgruntled engineering students to come back later. We heard innumerable variations on “My project’s due tomorrow,” “I have to have my lab notes,” and “She has no right to take over the lab like this!”

  By the end of a very long morning, I had come up with answers to all these complaints.

  “The semester isn’t over for three and a half weeks. Nobody’s term projects are due tomorrow, which by the way is a Saturday.”

  “She told us that if anyone forces their way in, she’ll burn their lab notes. And yes, she’s got matches.”

  “You’re welcome to tell her she has no right to take over the lab. In person. As soon as this is finished. Want to wait for her?”

  As a graduating senior, Meadow had had four years to impress her personality on the other engineering students. Nobody took me up on that last offer.

  “That woman is a real lesson in the power of stubbornness and crankiness,” I said after one of the robotics students, offered a chance to wait, had paled and left quickly.

  “Mmm. Remind me to keep you two apart,” Ben said. “I fear that she would encourage your worst qualities.”

  “I think of them as valuable traits for a researcher in a field that doesn’t actually exist. Anyway, we won’t be seeing much more of her if this works. Or if it doesn’t,” I added after thinking over the possibilities. I was all for Meadow’s success; the alternative appeared to be for Ben and me to become the Burke and Hare of the turtle world. But I still found it hard to believe this could work. Jimmy might be more optimistic because he was used to telling computers what to do and they o
beyed him. My experience with machines of any sort – starting with the coffee maker in the break room and working upward – was more about making tentative suggestions and being sneered at by the machine.

  It was after two when Meadow staggered out the lab door, leaned against the wall, and slid down to our level. “I. Do not. Believe. What I just did. I’m not a neurosurgeon! It couldn’t have worked! And now I want to forget all about it.”

  Ben removed a pair of ultra-fine-tip needle-nose pliers from her hand. “It didn’t work, then?”

  Meadow pushed her reddish-black curls off her face with both hands. “I didn’t say that. It shouldn’t have worked, though. I thought…”

  A long silvery blur zipped through the lab door and wound itself around Meadow’s legs. “You have done well,” the turtle head at one end of the silver thing said to Meadow. “You have earned favor in my eyes. You may call upon Niiqarquusu Adrahasis Galammta-uddua in your time of need.”

  “Mr. M! You’re all right?”

  The turtle head turned towards me. A moment later the silvery scales were coiled around one of my legs, and Mr. M.’s head was resting on my belt buckle. “You too, Daughter of Stars, have earned the favor of Niiqarquusu Adrahasis Galammta-uddua.” He unwound himself from my leg and slithered down the hall in a very fast undulating motion. I could have sworn I heard a “Whee!” before he turned around and sped back to us.

  There was no way we were going to get a three-foot metal snake, no matter how flexible, in the little box we’d been using to transport Mr. M. He announced loftily that he no longer needed our services, but after about ten yards of undulating along a sidewalk that had been soaking up heat all day he condescended to let me pick him up and drape him over my shoulders.

  “What’s my story if anybody asks what that thing around my neck is?” I whispered to Ben.

  “Uh… it’s a necklace?”

  Mr. M. promptly coiled one loop around my neck and wrapped the rest of his body around that loop, finishing in an ornate design around his own head.

  Chapter 12

  Back at Allandale House, Mr. M. zipped around the public side of the third floor, commenting on everything he saw. Coming from someone whose last experience of interior design was during the Nebuchadnezzar administration, there were a lot of comments and he required a lot of explanations, most of which he did not receive. Finally he consented to join us on the private side. He brushed me off when I tried to explain how to get to the other side of the wall.

  “This thing you call a Möbius strip was old when the stars were new. Did you children think you had invented it?”

  Actually, mathematicians – I mean the serious ones who are actually doing new work – debate about whether they are creating or just discovering the objects and spaces they define. I lean towards the “discovery” side of the debate, so I wasn’t worried by Mr. M.’s comment. It seemed quite probable to me. After all, if anyone in ancient Babylon had been thinking about a Möbius strip, it would have been him. I made a mental note to ask if he’d ever seen the Hanging Gardens.

  I didn’t see quite how he did it, but he was on the private side after I’d walked the Möbius strip.

  On my desk.

  Tapping his tail.

  And demanding a private office of his own.

  I could see that our new colleague was not going to be any less high-maintenance now that he had a body again.

  The private office demand generated a confused and acrimonious debate. We could partition off a space for him – we weren’t anywhere near filling up even this side of the third floor – but he wanted a door that he could close and open.

  How does a snake turn a doorknob?

  Even a very intelligent snake?

  “Could you do it by magic?” Ben suggested.

  “Waste my powers on such a mundane matter?”

  That was either a no, I won’t or a no, I can’t, and I didn’t think Mr. M. was open to debate on the subject.

  Fortunately, the mention of power brought something else to his mind.

  “Daughter of Stars, you should share your power.”

  “Say what?”

  “The Lights of the Medes,” Mr. M. said impatiently, as if that had been totally obvious. “Each magic user should hold some. They enhance your puny little workings.”

  I reached into my pocket and brought out the sparkling cloud. Now that it had been suggested, I found I was very reluctant to part with my little dancing friends. “Um, I already gave some to help Meadow with the surgery. How many…”

  “There is no end to the Lights.”

  “So….”

  The tail began tapping. “I thought you were a mathematician. What is half of an infinite set?”

  Okay, that was obvious. I’d have got it the first time if he’d spoken mathematics instead of mage. I dropped a handful into Ben’s palm, then into Ingrid’s. I took half of what I had left and held it in front of Mr. M., who opened his beak while the stars funneled down into God-knows-where. Now each of us had an infinite set of stars.

  “This dress doesn’t have pockets,” Ingrid said. “Is it okay if I put them in my purse?”

  Ingrid would be the last female student walking around campus in a dress and carrying a purse.

  “Only if you do not wish your powers augmented,” Mr. M. said, sounding testy. “They should be on your person at all times.”

  “Okay, I’ll get something to keep them in as soon as I can.” Ingrid stuffed her handful of sparkles into an interior pocket of her purse and zipped it shut. Ben was still holding a sparkling cloud in the palm of his hand and looking into it with that vague unfocused stare that usually meant his mind was a million miles away.

  Then he was.

  Oh, not quite a million miles away.

  But definitely not here.

  As it turned out, he was in Annelise Wilson’s room in Littlefield Dorm, which happens to be a women-only residence hall.

  And so was she.

  This is what happened, as Ben explained it later:

  He had been thinking two things at once as he gazed at the star cloud.

  Part of his mind had been wondering whether the stars would improve his teleportation range.

  A somewhat larger part of his mind was visualizing a scantily clad Annelise.

  It remains unclear whether Ben would have found himself in Annelise’s dorm room if she had not been there, or if she had not so closely resembled the image in his head. In the light of subsequent experience, I’m inclined to think he would have turned up wherever Annelise was. But at that time we hadn’t even begun to experiment.

  In any case – there he was. Holding something that looked like a spherical sparkler.

  And there she was, in black lace underwear and not very much of it at that.

  According to Ben, she didn’t scream or even squeak. She grabbed an extra-large T-shirt, pulled it over her head, and demanded, “What are you doing? And how did you get in here?”

  “I know you’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but I was just thinking about you. Just. Thinking. And suddenly here I was. I didn’t mean to burst in on you like this.”

  Annelise picked a pair of shorts off the floor and stepped into them. “You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

  “Annelise, are you talking on the phone again?” a girl called from the hall. “Just turn the poor goof down already, and come on. We’re going to be la…”

  The door swung open and a strange girl – strange to Ben, anyway – stared at him.

  “What’s he doing here? The Barker is going to kill you if she finds out you’ve smuggled a man onto the floor.”

  “Janice, I didn’t!” Annelise said.

  “Man on the floor?” squealed someone down the hall, and moments later three girls in babydoll pj’s were looking over Janice’s shoulder.

  “Well, how did he get here?”

  Both of them looked at Ben.

  “Why didn’t you reverse the mapping and put y
ourself back here?” I asked at this point in the tale.

  “Or use Camouflage?” Ingrid asked.

  “I was rattled,” Ben told us. “I couldn’t concentrate. You’d have trouble concentrating too if you suddenly found yourself in a strange place surrounded by scantily clad girls.”

  “Not as much trouble as you seem to have had,” Ingrid sniffed. “You really need to develop better concentration, Ben.”

  “Like you had day before yesterday when you walked into that pyracantha?” he inquired snidely.

  I didn’t want to listen to more bickering. “So what happened next?”

  What happened next was that a solidly built – and fully dressed - young woman shooed the onlookers away and started giving Annelise hell for having a man in her room. Expulsion was mentioned. So was the Dean’s office. And there was some talk about ‘the last straw.’

  “I can explain everything, Ms. Barker,” Annelise said as soon as the woman paused to breathe. “It’s… about Daddy’s new girl friend. Did you know she was Miss Ukraine two years ago, before she came to the US? Well, she… told Daddy… that the Ukranian Mob was trying to get her to spy on his business transactions with the Russians.”

  “And what transactions would those be?”

  “I have no idea. He told me that he’s not doing any business with the Russians, but the newspapers have been publishing terrible smears against him accusing him of selling our country out for profits from Russia based on the fact that he met Vladimir Putin at a State Department party five years ago, and apparently the Ukranians fell for it and threatened Anna, and she was terrified.”

  “And what has this international espionage got to do with your hiding a man in your room?”

  “Well, I’m trying to explain, but you keep interrupting. You see, they told Anna they knew all about it because they’d been listening in when I Skype with Daddy.”

  “Ha! A likely story!”

  “That’s what I thought. They couldn’t have learned anything important from my Skype chats with Daddy, do you think he tells me about his business? He thinks I’m still about six years old with pigtails and pink ribbon bows. But it’s about the bows, you see.”