A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  The stars moved and I held my breath. Once again they formed a spiraling shape pointed at my palm. There was a series of soft splotch noises behind me as the canapés I had failed to catch plopped gently to the floor. I lost my visualization but it was all right, the stars were still spiraling into the palm of my hand. There was a light prickling sensation again, and a momentary sense of being surrounded by something similar to my visualization but far larger and grander, a darkness shot through with the forces of the universe.

  Then I closed my hand over the little cloud of stars and prepared to lie my head off.

  Chapter 20

  “Thank you,” I said again, turning to face the room full of people, “for assisting with our first-ever…. um, our first…” full-dress unmitigated disaster. I choked on finding some better way to put that.

  Annelise came to the rescue. She was still pale beneath her tan, and she’d clenched one hand over some canapé that had squirted oil over her hand and her dress, but she took over from me like a pro.

  “Our first rehearsal of a new magic act,” she said now. “We’ll be appearing at the Slam Dunk Café next weekend, but as thanks to Ms. Harris for hosting this excellent party, the Superb Sutherland graciously agreed to provide a small demonstration tonight….” She kept blathering on while tossing desperate glances towards Ben. Finally he got the message.

  “And let me thank my lovely assistant,” Ben said, moving forward. He took Annelise’s hand and raised it up. There was a spattering of applause; they both bowed low and then backed away. Annelise was well situated to slip out of the room; Ben wasn’t so lucky, and serve him right if he was stuck here fielding questions from his impromptu audience for the rest of the night.

  Or… not. He was as pale as Annelise now, and there were beads of sweat along his hairline. It was his own fault he was in this fix, of course, but it would be all of our necks if he let something slip that would generate the wrong kind of attention to the Center.

  “Hold these,” I whispered to Lensky, and placed my right hand over his, then closed his fingers over the tiny sparkling cloud.

  With the stars safe, I moved over in front of Ben, hands up and outspread. “Thank you for your interest, ladies and gentlemen, but the Sublime Sutherland…”

  “I thought he was the Superb Sutherland,” one of the Regents grumbled.

  “He’s both,” I said quickly. “Superb, Sublime, and… “ Oh, help. The only su- word I could think of was “Superstitious.”

  “Superior,” Lensky said under his breath.

  “Sublime, Superb, and Superior. Your patience, please; you must know that a professional prestidigitator never reveals the secrets of his craft. You’re all welcome to join us at the Slam Dunk Café, one week from tonight, for another demonstration of the Superb Sutherland’s skills and another chance to guess how he performs these amazing feats.” I grabbed Ben’s hand and urged him to the door before the questioning could start again. Annelise was ahead of us, Lensky behind.

  Halfway down the hall, a quiet voice said, “In here,” and a door opened. We piled through and found ourselves on a redwood deck with a view of the city lights. I found a wall to lean on and slowly oozed down towards the bench behind me, deeply appreciative of the darkness and the cool, moist night air.

  “I,” I said without looking at anybody in particular, “need a drink.”

  “After that, I think we all do,” said the cool, quietly amused voice of the woman who’d ushered us out onto the deck. She pressed a button and said, “Santiago? A pitcher of frozen margaritas and four… no, five glasses, please. Yes, to the City Deck. And I believe some cleanup service is wanted in the Frank Erwin Room.”

  Of course it would be Whitney Harris herself who’d rescued us.

  And of course she would have a button in every room to summon a superbly trained staff whose function was to smooth over life’s little irregularities.

  In the darkness she was nothing but a profile under a cloudy mass of dark hair full of twinkling lights… I gasped before I registered that these were LED lights and each one was significantly larger than our stars.

  Lensky cleared his throat. “It must be difficult to train your staff to find their way around this place.”

  “I expect it would be,” Ms. Harris said, “but I use a cleaning service. And I gave the caterers the same map the cleaners use. I think it shows most of the main rooms.”

  “You think?”

  “I didn’t build this place,” she explained, “I bought it from a bankrupt real estate developer. I’ve never quite shed the feeling that I might go around two corners, open a door and discover a room I’d never seen before.”

  Her voice was light and tinkly, with a constant undertone of amusement that for some reason put my back up. She hadn’t said anything to warrant it, but nevertheless I had a feeling that she was explaining the lives of elites like her to the deprived commoners.

  The door to the hallway opened and a white-clad form bearing a tray appeared. Santiago, if that’s who it was, set the tray carefully on a table formed by an angle in the deck railing and silently withdrew.

  “Now,” Whitney Harris said as she began pouring, “who would like to tell me what that was really about?”

  Lensky cleared his throat again. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, ma’am. It’s classified.”

  “Indeed! You Center people don’t mind frightening my guests, but you draw the line at explaining yourselves?” She didn’t sound nearly as amused this time. “May I remind you that funding for the Center for Applied Topology comes through the Moore Foundation?”

  “But is only passed through,” Lensky countered. “The original funding comes from my agency.”

  “Which prefers to remain anonymous.”

  “Which does remain anonymous. I’m sure you signed the agreement, Ms. Harris.”

  Ben and Annelise were trying to bury themselves in their margaritas. I tapped Ben’s shoulder and gestured for him to pass one to me.

  “Do you need that?” Lensky asked, temporarily abandoning his fencing with Whitney Harris to return to bossing me around. Or trying to.

  “Anybody who can say ‘prestidigitator’ without even practicing is not nearly drunk enough for this party,” I told him, and let the icy drink slip down my throat. The tequila actually burned; whoever had mixed these was far more generous with the alcohol than were the owners of El Patio, where I consumed most of my margaritas. I made a mental note not to finish the drink too quickly.

  Ben was embarking on a confused and rambling ‘explanation’ of his impromptu magic show. Apparently Lensky didn’t object so long as the name of his super-secretive agency was not mentioned. Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? None of us actually knew it, though we had our theories.

  I sipped my frozen drink more carefully, to avoid either brain freeze from the slush or brain death from inhaling tequila too fast, looked at the stars – the real ones, I mean - and let my pulse rate slow down. This evening had been over the top in far too many ways.

  I remembered that Lensky was holding something for me. “You can give them back now,” I murmured under cover of Ben’s ‘explanation.’

  “Give what back?”

  “What I asked you to hold for me.”

  “Thalia, you gave me a handful of nothing. Are you sure you should be drinking that?”

  “Yes,” I said, prudently transferring the glass to the hand farthest away from Lensky. I opened my free hand, palm up. “Just give me back the… nothing, okay?”

  I guess he really did not see the little sparkling cloud that appeared when he opened his hand. Neither, to judge from their lack of reaction, did Whitney or Annelise. Ben, however, was startled enough to lose the thread of his story for a moment.

  “Those are mine.” He grabbed my wrist and almost made me spill my drink.

  “You have just as many without them,” I reminded him. “Haven’t you made enough trouble for one night?”

  “What are you arguing
about?” Whitney asked. She sounded as if she were really saying, “What are the children fighting over now, and can’t they be quiet?”

  “Uh, Thalia accused me of hoarding the margarita pitcher,” Ben improvised.

  “But he’s going to give me a refill now,” I said, raising my glass. With a sour look, Ben dumped half of his own drink into it. Never let a good lie go to waste, that’s my motto. I sipped my spoils while Ben went back to rambling about grackles, computers, the Axiom of Choice and the external hard drive onto which Jimmy DiGrazio had copied an image of Crowson’s laptop.

  “It took Jimmy all afternoon to get a look without triggering its self-destruct security option,” he was saying now, “but tomorrow we can analyze the data, and then Boris here can decide whether to stay on here or go back to Washington.”

  This was news to me; I’d imagined them dissecting the data from the hard drive today. Oh, well. It didn’t make much difference; in a day or two we’d have finished our part. Lensky would still be heading back within a few days.

  “Indeed!” Whitney said. “I had no idea that topology had so many interesting applications.” She sounded less than cheerful about it, but maybe that was because of her next words. “I’m afraid I should be getting back to my other guests. But do stay as long as you like. Shall I have Santiago bring another pitcher?”

  “No, thank you,” Lensky said, much too quickly. “We really must be going now.”

  Annelise, evidently the only one of us who’d been well brought up, supplied the appropriate social noises about Whitney’s lovely house and the lovely party and how fortunate we were to have been invited, while Ben skulked behind Lensky and avoided my eyes. Once outside, he grabbed Annelise’s hand and said, “See you later, my car is over there.”

  I got in his way. “First tell me what you thought you were doing in there.”

  “I wanted to impress Annelise,” Ben muttered sulkily.

  “You certainly did that,” Annelise told him. She sounded as icy as a frozen margarita. “And not in a good way. In case you were wondering.”

  Ben spread his hands. “You knew I could… do things, Annelise. It was in your job description!”

  “Yes. Silly me, I thought this was a date, not part of my job!”

  “But you rescued us anyway, for which I can’t thank you enough,” I interrupted the lovers’ quarrel. Ben could apologize to Annelise on his own time; what I really wanted to know was how he’d been able to calibrate the stars’ power so precisely. Judging from last night’s experiments, I would have expected the entire table of canapés to fly through the air.

  Ben smirked. “I selected a finite subset,” he said. “Started with one star, worked up to a dozen.”

  “Now that,” I said, “was really clever. Not what you used it for, but the idea of working with a finite subset instead of the whole cloud. I suppose the one-through-twelve experiments are what you were doing this afternoon, when I naively thought you and Jimmy were going to analyze his image of the laptop?”

  “Like I told Whitney, we had to get around the self-destruct code… well, Jimmy did; I wouldn’t know anything about that. In fact, now that we’ve got the laptop duplicated to an external hard drive, analyzing the data is pretty much pure computer geekery. He didn’t need my help.”

  “And of course, once you figured out how to use a subset of the stars, you had to demonstrate. In public. With the Dance of the Seventy-Seven Canapés.”

  “Seventy-two, actually.” Ben smirked again. “One star for every six pieces.”

  That was impressive precision. I really needed to stop wasting my time with the spook and get back to serious research, figure out exactly what the stars augmented and how, develop algorithms… “Algorithms” sounded better than “spells,” though I was no longer sure it was a more appropriate description. I sighed. “Take me home, Bradislav. Ben needs to start groveling to Annelise, and I need to get my head clear.”

  “You’re thinking again, aren’t you?” Lensky said as we picked our way along the edge of the road to his car.

  “There’s a lot to think about.”

  He sighed. Much more dramatically than I had done. “I knew it. I can practically see your brain fizzing and shooting off sparks.”

  “You object to me using my brain?”

  He opened the passenger-side door for me. “Experience suggests that this level of thinking is incompatible with a stop at Mount Bonnell on the way back.”

  I fastened the seat belt and waited for him to walk around the car. “I do respect a man who can accept defeat gracefully.” He was right, of course. When he’d led me up the garden - Mount Bonnell - path, I’d been vulnerable to hormones overpowering my good sense. Now I was back to sanity.

  “Normally,” he said mournfully as he started the car, “plying a girl with drink makes her more receptive to my advances, not less.”

  “Maybe you should try doing that next time you’re in Austin.” Which would be, like, never. “You spent most of this evening trying to get between me and my drinks, not plying me with them.”

  “Normally,” he said again, “a girl who’s passing you a handful of nothing – and then asking for it back - is already drunk enough for all practical purposes.”

  A handful of nothing to him, a pocketful of stars to me. The gap between us couldn’t have been clearer.

  “I’m not. Normal. I did try to tell you.” It hadn’t taken him long to make the leap from “I’m fascinated,” to “This is too weird,” had it? Even Rick had hung in there for a few days before deciding to dump me. Clearly the spook was more efficient about cutting his losses.

  He took me straight home with not one detour.

  Efficiency.

  Chapter 21

  The pecking at her window woke Linda. It was a grackle! A large one – maybe one of those the Bird Whisperer had been talking to yesterday? She pushed up her window. “Gaaak?”

  “Gaak, gaak, gaakle,” the bird answered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said – quietly, so as not to wake Pam and Jerry. “I don’t understand grackle yet.” Maybe it was telling her to come to the park for another lesson?

  One of the bird’s legs looked rather lumpy – no – was that a note tied to its leg? “I have to take the screen off,” she apologized. The grackle flapped noisily up to perch on the gutter, just as if it had understood her.

  Linda had meant to loosen the screen and drag it inside, but the first step required a hard push outwards and the second step never happened. She held her breath as the window screen spiraled downward and came to rest in a bed of lantana. Fortunately, Mom’s bedroom downstairs was at the front of the duplex; the rustling of lantana around the back probably wouldn’t wake her.

  The big grackle flapped again and landed on her windowsill. It was an imposing bird, maybe twice the size of an ordinary grackle and gleaming blue-black and blue-purple in the sunlight. Tentatively, Linda extended her hand towards what she was now very sure was a message for her. It seemed rude to just grab the bird’s leg and pull on it.

  “May I?”

  “Gaak, gaak, gaakle,” the bird said, just like before. Then it hopped to the inside of the windowsill and let out an impatient “Gaak!” Even a person who didn’t – yet – speak grackle could understand that. It was saying, “Get a move on already!”

  Very slowly and carefully, Linda reached for the end of black string dangling down the grackle’s leg. She unwound it, passing her fingers between the grackle’s legs, until the piece of paper it held plopped onto the windowsill. A breeze stirred it; Linda grabbed; the grackle fluttered off the sill with another series of harsh cries.

  Downstairs, Pam stirred, muttered, “Damn grackles,” and pulled the pillow over her head.

  “Apprentice bird whisperer,” the note read, “this is the time for your second lesson. Come at once to the place you know of, and tell no one.”

  Linda drew a deep, gratified breath. She had been accepted as an apprentice! She scrambled into her
jeans and t-shirt, picked up her sneakers and tiptoed downstairs. In the kitchen she paused for a moment, then wrote in caps on the whiteboard, “GONE TO LATONYA’S LOVE YOU MOM.” Hadn’t she been clever to invent LaTonya as a cover for playing by herself in the park! Now that invention would be truly useful. The injunction to tell no one was probably a test of her dedication.

  The thought did just flicker through Linda’s mind that even without that warning, she might not have wanted to tell Pam that she was going out, first thing on a Sunday morning, to meet a man who’d promised to teach her bird language. You never knew when a mother might do something stupid like insisting on meeting this man for herself, and Linda felt sure that would have been dreadfully insulting to the Bird Whisperer.

  She eased the back door open and, for possibly the first time since they’d moved to Austin, held the screen door so that it wouldn’t slam back against the door frame and irritate Pam. Once it had been very gently closed, she sat on the steps and tied her sneakers before quietly walking around the house, then running down the sidewalk.

  Sunday morning at Allandale House was a bit livelier than usual.

  Lensky was in Jimmy’s office, presumably unlocking the secrets of Raven Crowson’s laptop.

  I was there to work on using the stars in the way Ben had thought of, starting with a small finite subset and gradually adding to it until I had just the degree of augmentation necessary for what I wanted to do. It wasn’t completely straightforward because the stars didn’t seem to be with the program. They were sociable little guys; select one and half a dozen others would cluster with him. I was working on a selection condition that would get me a finite subset – for starters I would have taken any finite subset.

  Ben, of course, had already worked out something like this to get his little collection together, and now I understood how that could have taken him the whole afternoon. And yes, of course I could have simply asked him for his process. But it was the kind of problem I preferred to solve for myself, because once I’d worked through a solution I would never forget it.