A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  What a kid, thought Lensky. Imagine knowing words like ‘sedimentary’ at her age! No wonder she had trouble making friends.

  “So I think I’m going to be a bird whisperer. Come on!” She tugged him back towards the shrubbery.

  “A what?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of horse whisperers? Like that, except with birds.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Sure. In Freckles there’s this great scene where all the birds come and take food from his hands.”

  And the woman who wrote that book had been some kind of nature freak, hadn’t she? So who knew, maybe it was possible.

  “The good thing about being a bird whisperer,” Linda explained, “is that I’ll have plenty of material to work with.”

  Lensky managed the contortions necessary to get through the shrubbery again and stood up with a sense of relief. He didn’t really fit into an eleven-year-old’s play space.

  “See?” Linda waved her arms and a dozen black birds headed for the trees, cackling their grievance. “Birds all over the place!”

  Lensky looked at the birds. To him they were identical bundles of blue-black feathers. “Uh, Linda, I’m pretty sure all of them are grackles.”

  “Oh, I know that. There are lots of grackles in Austin around this time of year. Well, actually I think there are always grackles, but Angelina says there are more of them in spring. And people come and sit on those benches and throw them bits of bread, so they’re used to coming here. See, I’m going to start small and just concentrate on calling one kind of bird. Then after I do the grackles I can move on to whatever birds are around here in the summer. Don’t you think that’s sensible, Uncle Brad?”

  “Very mature,” he assured her.

  “And then when I can call half a dozen - who’s she?” Linda’s sentence switched directions entirely and ended on an aggrieved note.

  Spiky black hair framing eyes too big for her face, oversized T shirt advertising some rock group he’d never heard of, cutoffs and sandals. She hadn’t been behind them a moment ago, had she?

  “Ah – Linda, this is Thalia Kostis, one of the researchers I work with. Thalia…”

  “We don’t have time for introductions,” Thalia interrupted. “There’s a problem. Need you back at Allandale House.”

  She sounded breathless. “Thalia, can’t it wait? I’ve got my niece here…”

  “Okay, give me your gun and I’ll take care of it.”

  “No!”

  Linda tugged at his sleeve. “Uncle Brad, I can go home by myself. I do it all the time.” She sounded firm and sure of herself, and older than she’d been a few minutes earlier. He looked at her face and saw – yes, disappointment, but also a maturity he hadn’t seen before. Blast Pam, Linda probably had to be the adult in that relationship more often than was healthy. And now he was going to do exactly the same thing to her.

  “Are you sure, Linda?”

  “It’s three blocks! I was walking farther than that to get home from school in fourth grade!”

  “Okay. Tell Pam I was called away by an emergency, and I’ll be back as soon as I can, all right?”

  Chapter 17

  I was proud of the speed with which Lensky oriented himself. His gun was in his hand and pointed at Raven Crowson as soon as the room solidified around us. “Drop your weapon!”

  Crowson smiled and pocketed his gun. “Certainly, now that I have what I came for.” He released Annelise and picked up the MacBook that Ben had apparently just set down beside him. A flurry of black birds swooped through an open window, cawing and shrieking and surrounding him. When they scattered, he wasn’t there any longer, and Ben was giving me a dirty look.

  “You didn’t need to bring Boris into this. We had everything under control!”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” Lensky said. His own weapon had disappeared back under his sport coat. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what “everything” consists of? And don’t leave out the part where you brought an armed enemy into the office on the one day you knew I’d be out.”

  He sounded relaxed and friendly, but that little vein was jumping at his temple again.

  “Um – I’m sorry for interrupting your time with Linda. Wouldn’t you like to go back to her now?”

  “Not using the same transportation system, whatever that was,” Lensky said firmly, “and my car’s still parked in front of Pam’s house. I’ll call Uber when I’m ready to go back. But I have plenty of time to hear your stories.” He pulled up a chair and straddled it. “Who wants to go first?”

  “I have a seminar,” Annelise said, and bailed on us before anybody could ask what kind of seminar met at mid-day on Saturdays.

  “We might not have that much time,” Ben said. “As soon as Crowson opens that laptop he’ll – he’ll probably be back.”

  “If you’d gotten here sixty seconds earlier,” Ingrid said bitterly, “I’d still have my MacBook.”

  “Oh!” Now I got it. “You pulled a switch. That was brilliant.”

  “It bought us time. But not much...”

  Lensky interrupted. “Start at the end. How did Crowson get in here? Did he just walk up the stairs, or what?”

  Ingrid shook her head. “He just… appeared. I think. There were all these grackles screeching and zipping in and out the window, and then he was in the middle of them. Same way he disappeared just now.”

  “Well then,” Lensky said very calmly, “perhaps the first thing we should do is close the goddamn window.” He dragged his chair over to the outside wall, stood on it and turned the crank that opened and closed the louvered windows above his head.

  “Can you magicians do anything else to close off the building?”

  Ben shook his head. “Like a shield or something?”

  “Like a shield or something,” Lensky agreed, tight-lipped.

  “We haven’t actually worked on anything like that yet. Mr. M?”

  “I can keep the Master of Ravens from this part of the building,” Mr. M. said from where my belt buckle would have been, “but I shall require more of the magic brew.”

  “Coffee coming right up,” I promised him, and escaped into the break room to make it. I was feeling strange: shakier than that quick teleport out and back should have made me. “Sugar,” I muttered, and more or less inhaled the two doughnuts with pink icing while the coffee dripped. The sugar helped, but not quite as much as it had before; I still felt dizzy, and my pulse seemed to be racing.

  When I brought out coffee for Mr. M. and me, I noticed that Lensky was also looking kind of shaky, and he seemed fixated on my waist – oh! “You hadn’t met Mr. M. before, had you?”

  “Is it alive?”

  Mr. M. launched into a stream of multilingual invective that I could only admire. The general burden of his remarks seemed to be that not only was he alive, he had been alive for nearly three millennia and had forgotten more about being alive than Lensky had ever known. Furthermore, the solecism of calling him an it…. Well, you get the idea. I wish I’d pulled out my phone and recorded the whole thing for future reference; I could have been rude to people for a year on the basis of that tirade alone.

  Even Lensky’s eyes were wide with admiration – or something – by the time Mr. M. ran down, slithered out of my belt loops and deigned to accept a cup of coffee.

  “Sir, I apologize for failing to use your preferred pronouns,” he said very calmly – maybe too calmly. “Thalia, where did…”

  Ingrid’s aggrieved screech from the break room interrupted him. “Lia, did you eat all the doughnuts?”

  “There were only two left,” I said. “And I needed sugar after that transport job.”

  “Ben and I did rather a lot of teleporting too, you know.”

  “I know, sorry, how about if I go downstairs to the vending machine and buy Cokes for everybody?” That would get me out of the room while they told Lensky the story of our morning’s adventures.

  I came back with two Cokes for Ingrid and
me and a root beer for Ben, who has peculiar tastes. They’d drifted into the break room, all but Mr. M., who was doing his cobra sway again and looking fixedly at the spot where Crowson had appeared and disappeared.

  The atmosphere in the room seemed extremely tense. Lensky, Ingrid and Ben were all seated on one side of the table, looking at me. “Everybody caught up on recent events, then?” I said chirpily while handing out the soft drinks.

  “We decided to wait for you,” Ben said.

  “Since most of it was your idea,” Ingrid added.

  That was not exactly how I remembered it. But since I still felt funny, even after inhaling two doughnuts, I didn’t argue with them. I just thought back over the morning and tried to explain to Lensky how we got here from there.

  He didn’t interrupt, but I could feel a deep blue-black cloud sort of forming around him as I took him through the morning. It got darker and thicker with each turn in the story. When I finished, he took a deep breath and just stared at us for a long, long time.

  “So,” he said finally. “You decided to go adventuring with abilities that you admit you had not fully explored. You frightened the neighbors by accidentally rendering half of a house invisible.”

  “Briefly,” I reminded him.

  “You then invaded a private home without even finding out first whether it was occupied…” I couldn’t quite tell what annoyed him more, the illegality or our incompetence.

  “We couldn’t check,” Ben tried to explain, “the way we were jumping, we focused on the computer, not the place.”

  “And for a grand finale, you ‘jumped’ back to Allandale House, apparently leaving enough of a trail through the universal ether that the owner of the computer was able to follow you. The armed and criminal owner.”

  “And we kept the computer,” Ingrid pointed out, “and could have got rid of him with no trouble. We didn’t need you to show up with another gun. You should stop treating us like some zany undergraduates who’ve been pulled into the Dean’s office for a stupid prank.”

  “Ingrid’s right,” I said. “Why don’t you go take your niece out to lunch and leave the professionals here to examine Crowson’s computer?”

  “Do I dare?”

  “If you want to sit in an empty break room all afternoon,” Ben said, “we have no problem with that. We will be on the Research Side, doing the work you’ve been so desperately eager for us to do.”

  A sour look crossed Lensky’s face. I think he really hated it that we could move into a space he couldn’t reach without our help. “All right. If you need me to rescue you again, try my cell; you don’t have to display your special talents all over town. God knows how I’m going to explain this to Linda.”

  At the door he paused and looked back at me. “Seven. And for God’s sake wear something that won’t get you arrested for public indecency.”

  Linda watched her uncle and the strange girl turn sideways and get… narrow. They became a blinking image that narrowed to a line and then disappeared altogether.

  “I always knew the Narnia books were non-fiction,” she said to an outsize grackle at her feet.

  The bird responded with a friendly “Gack, gack, gack,” flapped its wings, and went spiraling up into the sky with a very un-gracklish smoothness. Linda watched until it disappeared and then turned her attention to the nearest bench, where several more grackles were waddling about in the hope of discovering some neglected particles of birdseed from the lady who sometimes sat there, or maybe some nice juicy bugs.

  “Gack?” she said questioningly as she walked toward them. “Gaaaack?”

  They let her get within ten feet of the bench and then flew upwards all at once to perch over her head on a live oak tree, where they gackled and gacked loudly. Linda had a feeling they were laughing at her.

  “I guess I don’t speak their language – yet.”

  But how was she to learn it if they wouldn’t stick around and chat? Linda sat on the bench and practiced being still, being inanimate, being just another bit of the park furniture. Time crawled by. The shadows of the trees shortened slightly. Grackles sailed past from tree to tree. Two joggers came around the curve to her right, inspiring a fresh burst of gackling overhead, and disappeared down the long straight path to the left. A couple of large grackles ventured down to peck around the ground ten feet from Linda’s bench. “Gack?” she said softly.

  The birds didn’t even look up. Linda tried to tighten her throat and make the word sound more like a caw. “Gack.”

  One of the grackles looked up and fixed her with a bright black eye. It looked as though it was about to speak, Linda thought.

  Then the Lady With Three Dogs came around the bend and both birds fled with a derisive “Gack, gack, gack!”

  Linda liked dogs and was used to seeing these three in the park on weekends, but she did wish the lady had chosen to walk them earlier or later. Still, it wasn’t the dogs’ fault, and they were used to being petted by Linda. The lady paused as she always did, and Linda fondled Buster’s floppy brown ears, scratched under Bozo’s black chin, and rubbed Mutt’s head. She remembered that she really did like Buster, Bozo and Mutt, and gave them as much attention as she could before the lady moved on with a friendly nod.

  Now there was somebody sitting on the next bench over. Linda glowered at him. Dogs were one thing, extraneous adults quite another. How was she to achieve her destiny as a Bird Whisperer if people kept interfering like this?

  While she was giving the unwanted man her best death stare, the two grackles that had been at her feet earlier fluttered out of the live oak. At least, she thought they must be the same two; both were considerably larger than the other grackles. They circled the stranger’s head. Then they settled on the bench, one on each side of him. He talked softly for a few minutes – so softly that Linda couldn’t catch a word – and then the grackles flew up, circled him several times, and returned to their live oak.

  Linda had stood up and come closer without really thinking about it. Now she burst out, “How do you do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t do anything,” the dark-haired man said. “The grackles do it all. It’s just a matter of speaking their language.”

  Mom periodically warned Linda against speaking to strangers, but a fellow Bird Whisperer hardly counted as a stranger. She came right up to the bench. “Will you teach me?”

  “Can you learn?”

  Ben may be the only truly intelligent person in the Center. He called in Jimmy, who brought over some equipment and copied the entire contents of Crowson’s laptop to a little box he called an external hard drive. “Now,” he told us, “you can swap the laptops back. All of his information is in here.”

  Ingrid eyed the box suspiciously. “It is?”

  “Look at it,” Ben said. “The way we looked for Crowson’s laptop.”

  Ingrid touched her tea ball and I put a hand in my pocket. The palm of my hand prickled ever so slightly, as if I’d put it down on a bowl of very fizzy soda. And now I could see that Jimmy’s box seethed and simmered with the same sickly miasma that covered the laptop.

  “Double, double toil and trouble,” Ingrid murmured, dropping her hand. “Lia, how are we able to see this? I wasn’t visualizing, were you?”

  I shook my head. “I think Mr. M and his stars have their own magic, and it’s got nothing to do with mathematics.”

  “I don’t like this. How do we know what we’re doing if it’s not based on proven mathematics?”

  It didn’t seem to me that we’d known a whole lot about what we were doing before Mr. M entered our lives. The real difference was that now we were able to do a whole lot more of what we didn’t understand.

  And boy, was that ever a reassuring thought.

  “There is something distinctly eye-of-bat and toe-of-frog about it,” Ben agreed.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck to quote that play? Will you two please knock it off? We need to figure out how we’re going to switch the laptops back.”
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  Ingrid shivered. “I do not want to jump blind into That House again. Not unless we get the spook back. With his gun.”

  “Break room,” I said. “Pizza. We’re going to need fuel.”

  We discussed the problem until the pizza guy arrived. Ben was in favor of simply dropping Crowson’s laptop off with the police. Ingrid and I explained, separately and then in chorus, that this was an excruciatingly bad idea. Not only was it unlikely that the cops would bother to examine a laptop that had been dropped off at their equivalent of a Lost and Found box, but when Crowson discovered he’d been cheated we’d have nothing to trade him for our lives.

  “And my MacBook,” Ingrid finished. “I want that back.”

  Paying for the pizza was a slightly fraught experience. I pointed out that I had already sprung for soft drinks and doughnuts that day; Ingrid and Ben pointed out that these cost considerably less than a large pepperoni half-pineapple pizza. In the end it was less a question of fairness than of what we could find in our pockets, which left all of us feeling equally broke.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if Dr. Verrick authorized a credit card for the Center?” I said after the delivery guy left with most of our liquid holdings.

  Ben looked thoughtful. “This is a work-related expense, isn’t it?”

  “And Annelise could use it to pay for the morning doughnuts.”

  There was a light, metallic, scaly sound – sorry, but I don’t know how else to describe it – as Mr. M. twined up a wooden leg and onto the table. Naturally he wanted to know what we were eating, and it didn’t help when Ben described it as one of the five basic food groups. Fortunately he decided, after a couple of disdainful sniffs, that turtle-snakes did not care for pizza. He did, however, demand more coffee.

  We stalled. Our first experience of Mr. M. plus caffeine had been eerily similar to us with magic stars: you didn’t know what was going to happen, and it was likely to be more exciting than you bargained for. He demanded testily (his default state) whether we wanted him to solve our current problem or not.