A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  Slow, counted breaths to calm my mind. Clusters of bright points in the darkness; sets. Let the leaves of each tree denote a set… I reached out with imaginary hands and touched a rain-wet leaf, felt the connection going one way down into the earth and the other way into a mapping onto the bright points of an imaginary set. This was easy! I could sense the other trees around the building and map each tree’s leaves onto another set. I could sense some of the space around the trees, too; the rain-slick shingles of the roof below the leaves, birds huddled under branches. But that wasn’t relevant. I thought about the Axiom of Choice, let a single point move out of each set, leaving a glowing line behind to denote its path…

  For a moment I thought it was raining in my room, as wet leaves pattered down around me.

  Success!

  The leaves were followed by harder, heavier objects. I put a book over my head for protection and recognized… shingles.

  And now it was raining in my room.

  Saturday morning.

  A reasonable part of the morning: around ten. No pre-dawn shenanigans today. At least, not jointly.

  Lensky was off, it was the weekend anyway, what were we doing in Allandale House?

  Comparing notes, obviously. We’d all given in to the temptation to experiment with our augmented abilities. Well, Ingrid and I had, anyway. And Ben looked as if he hadn’t gotten any more sleep than we had.

  Ingrid and I had wondered how to get in touch with The Man Without a Cell Phone. It was probable that we could now do it without using the phone system, but communication had not been a research focus for any of us. Of course it hadn’t. Look, one of Ingrid’s contributions to our apartment furnishings had been the “Enough Interaction” doormat that Lensky had objected to.

  It was possibly a little bit weird given that our apartment was on the second floor of the building, but we loved it so much that we put it out in the hall anyway.

  So it was fortunate that we found Ben in the break room, bleary-eyed and poking ineffectually at the coffee maker. “It’s about time you got here,” he said by way of greeting. “Can either of you make this thing work?”

  “How did you know we were coming in this morning?” It was going to be beyond creepy if his augmentation included the ability to read our minds without us even noticing. Ingrid took the carafe to the bathroom to fill it with water, and I broke open one of the packets of super-cheap coffee that Dr. Verrick provided. We thought he got them from a discount sales warehouse in California that had to ship them around the Horn to reach Texas.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t read your minds,” Ben said. Which was not the most reassuring thing he could have said under the circumstances. “It just seemed obvious. Some of these effects are… really powerful. I think we should do our experimenting in the private side of the Center until we have a little more control.”

  “I hate to admit it, but you’re probably right,” Ingrid said. Her hands weren’t as beautifully smooth and white as usual. Heaving cinderblocks around tends to mess up your manicure.

  “I do see your point,” I said reluctantly. The roof shingles which I’d unintentionally selected the previous night were now hidden under my bed, just in case the landlord started looking for someone to blame for the leaky roof.

  “And what minor disaster did you get into last night?” Ingrid asked Ben.

  “Uh… I’ll tell you… after you two tell me exactly why you agreed with me so quickly.” Damn! We should have bickered for a while. It was out of character for all three of us to agree on something without arguing, and Ben had picked up on that. We condensed our confessions into one sentence apiece.

  When Ben headed for the pot, Ingrid blocked him. “No coffee until you tell us what happened to you.”

  Ben took off his glasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. His brown eyes looked even vaguer than usual. “Littlefield Dorm again.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad. You were doing that even before… oh. No. The first time it happened was right after Lia gave us the stars. Still… you didn’t get caught this time, did you?”

  “Not the first time.”

  “You went twice?”

  “The second time was all right too.”

  “When did you get caught?”

  “The seventh time, and I got away. I don’t think Ms. Barker got a good look at my face.”

  Ingrid sank into a chair, incidentally clearing the way to the coffee maker. I let Ben have the first cup; he looked seriously under-caffeinated. “Merciful heavens, Ben, what were you playing at? Didn’t it occur to you that if you kept revisiting the scene of the crime you were bound to get caught eventually?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!” Ben shouted. “It just happened every time I thought about… well, you know.”

  “And you called Lensky a sex maniac!”

  “That’s different. He makes crude jokes at you of his own free will.”

  “And you, apparently, think about you know every thirty seconds. How did you manage to stay out of Annelise’s dorm after the seventh visit?”

  “Remember what Mr. M said about us needing to be in actual contact with the stars to augment our powers? I put them in an empty jar and left it in the kitchen nook. Then I finally got some sleep.”

  Ingrid reached for the tea ball she had hung around her neck rather than sewing a bag for the stars, and took it off. Very carefully. By the chain.

  I didn’t have such a convenient solution. I couldn’t exactly take off my cutoffs. I’d just have to remember not to stick my hands in my pockets.

  “Did you punch air holes in the lid?”

  “They’re perfectly all right,” Ben said defensively. “Look, here they are all dancing around in their jar.”

  The jar did seem to make a good container for his stars; even in daylight, they formed a blue-white cylinder of dancing light contained by the glass.

  “That was a good idea,” I allowed grudgingly. “But we’re going to have to learn to work with them. We can’t go around grabbing our Tea Balls of Power every time we want to augment our work and dropping them when the augmentation is too strong.”

  “Yes, but let’s work on the private side.” Ben grabbed his jar, turned sideways, took three steps and disappeared.

  I poured a second cup of coffee into one of the spare mugs and took both cups over to the private side.

  “Why two?” Ingrid asked when she popped into the hall a moment later.

  “I want to try something.”

  Mr. M. had slept through our experiments last night and had been too dozy to play necklace this morning. Which was sort of ok; he was really too big to make a convincing necklace. Now I drew him out of my belt loops, making sure not to catch his metal scales, and set him down on my desk with a cup of coffee in front of his pointy little head.

  He started sniffing almost immediately. Then his beak began opening and shutting, and finally he raised up his front six inches, made an arch, and dipped down into the coffee.

  “What is this potion?” he demanded when he came up for air.

  “It’s called coffee. I don’t think they had it when you were last… active.”

  “It must be the drink of the gods, which in my time they reserved for themselves. I feel younger and shinier already.” He dipped his head back into the coffee. I chugged my own cup. I was already beginning to feel that I might need extra caffeine to deal with Mr. Younger and Shinier.

  “I wonder where it goes,” Ingrid whispered. “Seeing that most of him is… no longer organic.”

  I wondered too, but felt it might be too personal a question to ask a newly awakened Babylonian mage.

  Wherever he was putting the coffee, he certainly put it away in a hurry; his cup was empty almost as soon as mine was. “Ahhhh!” he announced. “I feel young again – not a day over two hundred.” He slithered from my desk to the chair and then to the floor, and began racing from office to office in a series of shimmering figure-eights. This time I definitely heard, �
�Whee!”

  “We’d better ration the caffeine in future,” Ben murmured. “About a third of a cup, you think?”

  “Just wait until he discovers sugar,” Ingrid said.

  The first experiments were tricky, and Mr. M. was too jazzed up on coffee to be any help; he just raced around the offices getting underfoot.

  We wanted to keep whatever we did behind the wall that closed off the private side. That meant really strict control whenever we thought about teleportation. Given Ben’s recent history, we forbade him to do any personal experimenting on the first tests; he could take notes while Ingrid and I worked on office-hopping for a while. We focused on just moving between offices, and found that as long as we carefully avoided thinking about anything beyond the private side, we could make the desired move instantaneously. For me the experience was like a split second in darkness, a flash of two curved surfaces that barely touched, and then I was in the target office. Conveniently, we materialized in spaces that weren’t shared by furniture. I guess that part of the laws of physics must be compatible with Brouwer’s theorem.

  After we felt confident that we wouldn’t overshoot, we tried holding hands with Ben (whose stars were still on his desk) and jumped from one office to another without telling Ben where we were going.

  One of us could move him, but it felt like wading through knee-high water. When we tried a joint effort, there were some problems with coordination. “You know what?” Ingrid said after the second time our attempt at a joint jump turned into an inconclusive tug-of-war. “We need to name the things that work and practice until the name triggers the image in our minds.”

  “Huh. I’ve been calling it ‘Mapping’ and I don’t want to get triggered to jump every time some bozo mentions looking at a map.”

  “How about “Brouwer” for the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, since that’s what we’re using?” Ben suggested.

  “Um. I don’t know. Didn’t he prove a number of other theorems?”

  “None as well-known, and none that we’re using right now. And nobody’s likely to casually mention Brouwer.” He thought for a moment and appended, “As long as we stay out of the math building.”

  Ingrid and I practiced jumping together while he gave us the cue. He was right; after a few practice sessions, the image of two surfaces connected at a single point flashed into my mind the moment he said the word, and our combined jumps from one office to another became a thing of beauty. Adding Ben didn’t help much, since we were still keeping him away from the stars, but it was a lot easier than it had been with only one of us trying to move him.

  Worked like a charm. There was really only one tiny little glitch. By way of winding down Ingrid and I did a couple more solo jumps and… Well, I was hungry, and since it was Saturday nobody had brought in any pastries, and at the conclusion of one jump I found myself in the doughnut shop at 28th and Guadalupe.

  So it shouldn’t be a total waste, I bought a selection of doughnuts before picturing my own office and thinking the magic word.

  “What took you so long?” Ingrid demanded.

  “I got a teensy bit distracted.” I proffered the box of doughnuts as a peace offering. Ben and Ingrid carefully set their collections of stars aside and we transferred to the break room. For some reason Ingrid and I were ravenous. We blew through three plain glazed doughnuts each while Ben was working on the one with chocolate icing.

  “Workings require power,” Mr. M. informed us while undulating up and down the table.

  “Isn’t that what the stars do? Give us more power?”

  “There are different kinds of power. You will find that you need to replenish your bodies more frequently as you move to greater workings. What are those round pink things?”

  Ingrid quickly closed the lid of the box on the remaining two doughnuts (pink icing with chocolate sprinkles). “Coffee cups… topologically speaking,” she added, making her statement kinda-sorta true.

  (“I just wasn’t ready for Mr. M. on a sugar high,” she told me later.)

  “But without coffee in them? Ah, well…” From somewhere, Mr. M. drew a great heaving sigh of disappointment and looked pointedly at the empty coffee carafe.

  By unspoken agreement, we all ignored the hint.

  “You seem to have made significant progress with Travel,” Mr. M commented.

  Ingrid frowned. “I don’t know. Lia screwed up this last time.”

  Nice way to put it. She’d been happy enough to eat the doughnuts, hadn’t she?

  “More important,” said Mr. M, “despite surprise and the distraction of a strange environment, she was able to invoke Travel well enough to get herself back here immediately. I believe you young mages are ready to expand your horizons.”

  Ben frowned. “We sort of decided that we’d keep it all inside the Research Division until we had complete control.”

  Mr. M. made some remarks about slackers and cowards which I prefer not to repeat.

  “Tell the truth, Mr. M. You’re all jazzed up from that coffee and you want to go places and do things.”

  Mr. M. curved his neck around and studied his reflection in his own shining scales.

  Having said that, I realized that I felt that way too. Across the table from me, Ingrid’s eyes were sparkling.

  It was, of course, possible that we were just on a sugar high. That, or we’d been possessed by the Monumentally Bad Idea Fairy, because Ben wiped the chocolate icing off his mouth and said, “Why don’t we get Crowson’s computer?” and both of us agreed. It was Saturday; chances were the office would be empty. But just to be on the safe side, we agreed to focus on the vacant office next to Crowson’s – a place all three of us had clear memories of.

  To lean even more on the side of safety, Ben said, “We should really take Annelise with us. In case, you know, some little thing goes wrong.”

  If anybody ever tells you that he’s taking extra precautions just in case some little thing goes wrong, run.

  But we didn’t know that at the time, and when Ben borrowed my phone to call Annelise and invite her along, we felt that we’d covered all the bases and were practically going on a picnic. And Mr. M. egged us on. As he pointedly mentioned about half a dozen times, it had been a long time since he’d seen anything but the Turtle Pond and the inside of Allandale House. Of course he could go exploring by himself…

  A vision of coeds shrieking and athletes pouncing on the silvery streak that was Mr. M. chilled my blood, followed by the even more chilling thought of what he might say if interrogated. He didn’t really understand how our world worked, he was completely devoid of tact, and I could all too easily envision him being stomped to death by someone who was freaked out by a talking snakebot with a turtle head.

  The suggestion that maybe he should stay in the office did not go over at all well. And there wasn’t really any way I knew to imprison a slithery, untrustworthy mage whose powers were far beyond ours – look at the languages, for instance, how did he do that? I’d sweated blood just to make it through French II. I probably wouldn’t have passed if it hadn’t been for Aunt Alesia, whose breakfast-table habits had given me an accent that made whatever I said sound good no matter how ungrammatical and unidiomatic it was.

  Anyway, we cooperated with Mr. M. – not having much of a choice – and by the time Annelise got there, he had squirmed though the belt loops on my cutoffs and had coiled his extra length of tail around his head until he looked like an exceptionally ornate belt buckle.

  Annelise listened to Ben’s brief explanation, but I wasn’t sure she’d really taken it in. She seemed to be more concerned with the doughnut box on the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was supposed to do coffee and pastries this morning.”

  “You weren’t,” Ingrid reassured her. “Only during the week – and even then, only after we get the petty cash box set up. The way Dr. Verrick pays, you could wind up spending your whole after-tax salary on snacks for us.”

  But Annelise kept apologizing, and so
we may possibly have failed to brief her quite as thoroughly as would have been desirable.

  “Will you take Annelise and I take Ben,” Ingrid asked, “or the other way round, or should all four of us hold hands?”

  Mr. M uncoiled the extra length of tail long enough to say, “Circles move and amplify power.” Then he rewrapped his delicate silvery coils and, to all appearances, fell asleep. Possibly he was tired after that caffeine-fueled race up and down and around our offices.

  “You know, it might be safe to let Ben use the stars,” I said slowly. “Under the circumstances…” I cut my eyes to where Ben, grinning, had already captured one of Annelise’s hands.

  “He’s not likely to go off-target,” Ingrid agreed. “And we won’t get drained so fast; it’s got to be easier for three to carry one than for two to carry two.”

  I dug into my pocket and offered Ben a handful of stars.

  “Keep yours, I can use my own,” Ben said.

  Great. Holding Annelise’s hand was already reducing his IQ. “Half of an infinite set, remember?” I held out the little sparkling cloud and Ben took it.

  “Office 21A,” I said, and waited a moment to be sure everybody had the dusty office in their minds. “Brouwer!”

  Chapter 15

  This was the farthest we’d gone yet. The inter-office jumps had seemed instantaneous; even the accidental jump to 28th and Guadalupe didn’t feel as if it had taken any time. I didn’t know if it was the longer distance, or the fact that we were essentially carrying Annelise as dead weight, but I had just a bare second or two to experience the in-between space we traveled through. I was a glowing point of light, sliding along an arc from one vertex to another…

  My feet came down on the bare, dusty boards of Office 21A and I felt a sharp pang of loss. I looked at Ingrid’s and Ben’s faces and saw the same sentiment there.