An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  An Annoyance of Grackles

  Applied Topology Book 3

  Margaret Ball

  Galway Publishing

  Copyright 2018 Margaret Ball

  Published by Galway Publishing

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947648-10-4

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-947648-11-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover art: Cedar Sanderson

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  Table of Contents

  1. Sometimes a grackle is just a grackle

  2. We try not to disturb normal people

  3. The Mathematical Mafia

  4. The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Turtle

  5. I do not even wish to know that it exists

  6. A job for the Center

  7. Intelligent, competent, angry and amoral

  8. A whirling cloud of grackles

  9. Bollywood freestyle

  10. Intoxicated by your touch

  11. Liar, liar…

  12. The Wrath of Thalia

  13. A strong desire to duck and cover

  14. Elvis meets the Ramones

  15. The sacred knucklebone of St. Elias

  16. A god of darkness and despair

  17. The best makeout site in Floydada county

  18. The reflexes of the average topologist

  19. Vlad the Impaler on voicemail

  20. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

  21. A surrender with honor

  22. Your very, very short future

  23. You have just killed her yourself

  24. I am IIT-trained expert in destruction of small devices

  25. All your nights and all your days

  Sample: A Tapestry of Fire

  1. Sometimes a grackle is just a grackle

  He was shouting my name.

  “Thalia! Thalia, don’t!”

  “Lensky?”

  The room was dim; it must be very early morning. I could just see that his eyes were closed. His whole body jerked spasmodically as he drew breath for another shout.

  I shook his shoulder. “Lensky, wake up, you’re having a bad dream!”

  That didn’t wake him, so I went to emergency measures: an elbow in the ribs.

  “Thalia! Ow! Don’t…”

  His eyes opened. He breathed heavily for a few moments. “Ah, was I snoring?”

  “Dreaming. I think. You were shouting at me not to do something.”

  A relieved huff. “Well, what’s new about that?”

  And after a moment, “You’re sure I wasn’t shouting at you to quit elbowing me like that?”

  “That was after.”

  “Oh, well. Sorry to wake you.” He rolled over on his side and closed his eyes.

  I deployed my elbow again. “Tell me.”

  “Mmm? Never can remember dreams.”

  “You’ve been having this one for a week. I want to know what’s going on with you.”

  With a sigh, Lensky rolled onto his back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Do we have to do this at oh-dark-thirty?”

  “Yes, because you’ve been dodging my questions all week and this time I’m not waiting until you get your defenses back in place.”

  He sighed again. “All right. I’ve been having this dream.”

  I waited.

  “You’re about to teleport someplace, and somehow I know you shouldn’t, it’s a trap. I shout at you to stop but you just - disappear. And I know I’ll never see you again.”

  “I was afraid it was something like that.” I’d almost been expecting it. That didn’t make me any happier. “You’ve done your best to accept my paranormal abilities. But obviously there’s a level where you can’t accept them, where you equate my using my abilities with your losing me.” In the long run, no outsider could accept them. I should have known better than to think Lensky would be different. He’d held out longer than Rick the Rat, but now even he couldn’t take it any more.

  “Oh, stop with the pop psychology! I do accept your abilities. It’s not about that. It’s about Blondie, if you must know.”

  “You dream about a terrorist bomber? That’s kinky.”

  “Bomber, yes, but maybe not a terrorist. The analysts at the Agency have been doing some digging; they’ve learned a lot from the papers you got out of his safe last fall. I’m not supposed to tell you much about it, but I can say this much: he may have identified me in October, and through me he may have identified you. If he goes after you… He won’t. If it even looks like he’s getting close, I’ll see to it that you’re safe. But just for a few days, would you humor me? Ride in to the office with me?”

  “All right.”

  “Promise? You won’t get impatient and teleport yourself?”

  “Yes. I promise. Now go back to sleep.”

  “Not much chance of that now,” he grumbled. Instead he got up and started coffee, and we watched the January sunrise stain the cloudy sky red. His condo had been built by somebody who understood Austin. Big windows to the west are virtually useless; you have to keep them covered for nine months of the year or you’ll cook in the afternoon sun. Big windows to the east are much, much better. In the case of Lensky’s condo, they gave us a view of a narrow strip of trees following a seasonal creek, and above the trees, a broad sweep of sky.

  About the time I finished my first cup of coffee, a swarm of grackles rose from the trees. They took flight like a cloud of shadows, whirling and screeching and re-forming in mid-air before settling among the trees again. I shivered.

  Lensky could worry about the terrorist bomber, but “Blondie” was only human, with only human abilities. I was much more worried about the Master of Ravens.

  ***

  Parking on the UT campus is never fun, but Lensky has a really good permit and today we got there early enough to park quite close to Allandale House, the Victorian mansion whose third floor housed the Center for Applied Topology. All the same, getting from the parking space to the office required us to walk under live oaks where more grackles perched. It crossed my mind that it was just about impossible for anyone to enter and leave Allandale House by conventional means without being observed by an annoyance of grackles. (Yes, that really is the collective noun; I looked it up.) Seemed to me that teleporting was not only more convenient but safer; pop out of the condo and into the private side of the Center, with no grackles involved.

  Still, I wasn’t the one having nightmares.

  And I had no reason to believe that the Master of Ravens was even in Austin, let alone plotting another attack on the Center. It’s just that I felt about idle grackles much as our director, Dr. Verrick, feels about topologists at loose ends: trouble waiting to happen.

  Sometimes, I told myself, a grackle is just a grackle. And that’s quite bad enough.

  The office was empty when Lensky and I got there, but it didn’t stay that way for long. By the time I had settled Mr. M. at my desk there were promising noises from the public side. Annelise, our receptionist and resident fabulist, had come in with a box of fresh doughnuts. Ben Sutherland had come with her, naturally. “Do you commute with Annelise just to make sure you get first crack at the doughnuts?” I asked him. It wasn’t a totally unreasonable question. Our most innovative research fellow when it comes to finding new paranormal applications for topology, he has an innovative approach to eating as well, involving things like chocolate with root beer or pizza with anchovies and pineapple as well as a serious doughnut addiction. I figure he stays slim because all that stuff isn’t really food. At least Annelise had broken him of the habit of buying shirts that were way too large because he couldn’t be bo
thered to try anything on. Or maybe she was just buying his shirts for him now.

  “We’ll need them this morning,” he said without actually answering the question. “Staff meeting at ten.”

  “Break room?”

  “That or your office. It’s research fellows only.”

  “Break room.” My office was actually big enough to accommodate all four research fellows and Dr. Verrick, but I didn’t want them making a habit of it.

  I’d thought that Ben and I would have a leisurely morning of sipping coffee, picking out the best doughnuts, and swapping notes on our research. But Colton Edwards came through from the private side only ten minutes later, and Ingrid Thorn actually came up the stairs like a normal person.

  “I think they’ve got the break room bugged,” Ben groused. “Have you noticed how everybody shows up at once when Annelise sets out new doughnuts? And he doesn’t even need one,” he said, mock-scowling at Lensky.

  “They also serve who only spook and spy,” Lensky said equably. “And you don’t need them nearly as much as you used to.” He took a cruller back to his office; he didn’t enjoy meetings any more than the rest of us, and according to Ben he wasn’t expected to attend this one.

  What Lensky said was true – about the doughnuts, I mean. We’d started having these periods of feeling very shaky about the time our research really began to pay off, late last spring. The twinkling lights we called “stars,” brought by Mr. M. from ancient Babylon, functioned as amplifiers for the effects we achieved by applied topology alone. A logical consequence was that when we started teleporting across town instead of teleporting two feet across the office floor, we needed to eat more – a lot more. It wasn’t all that surprising; topologists have always been fueled by coffee and doughnuts. It’s just that the doughnut part got a whole lot more important after our research took off.

  Different kinds of work exert different drains on our bodies. Camouflage, which is really just a kind of bending the light, is not that demanding. With telekinesis, it depends on the weight of the object you’re moving and the distance you want it to go. (There is some kind of relationship between what we do and classical physics; we’re just not exactly sure what it is.)

  Teleportation, which by definition implies moving your own weight and often requires you to move somebody else’s weight as well, had been our worst energy-sucker up to now, and even that was getting better. Last spring, teleporting across town required serious refueling. By fall we could jump halfway across the state – and Texas is not exactly a small state. This winter the chief limiting factor on our range was identifying places to teleport to, because with some exceptions we have to visualize the destination very clearly before jumping. Our adviser – that would be Mr. M., not Dr. Verrick - said we were building mental muscles as we practiced.

  “I’m going to need muscles and doughnuts when I start flying,” Colton said, enveloping a sour cream twist in one of his big hands. If he ever found a topological analog to flight, we’d probably have to triple our doughnut fund; it was going to take a lot of fuel to lift that body. He wasn’t fat, just large. All over. And he made it worse by wearing big, clunky boots that were a hazard to innocent bypassers.

  Ben and I rolled our eyes. Flight had been Colton’s obsession since he was hired on last fall. His single-minded concentration on the problem had resulted in a lot of six-inch falls, three annoyed topologists, and – as a grand finale – a three-story fall from above his office to the ground just outside the building. In that last episode he’d managed to hook one of his boots over a balcony railing and suffered a severe sprain that left him on crutches for days. After the experience of nearly killing himself, followed by the experience of being surrounded by angry topologists telling him not to even think about pulling that again, he’d kept his flying experiments reasonably quiet. But we all knew he was still working on it.

  “You haven’t given up yet?”

  “Um. I think I’ve been following the wrong angle, trying to expand teleportation. Ingrid suggested we look at path-connected spaces.” He nodded as Ingrid came into the room, slightly out of breath, and offered her a sour cream glazed doughnut. As usual, she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a time machine and hadn’t caught on to modern fashions yet. She wore her silver-blond hair in braids wrapped around her head, and she seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of white blouses which she wore buttoned up to the collar. I do understand about vintage clothes – I spend a lot of time at Buffalo Exchange looking for classic rock T-shirts – but Ingrid’s blouses always looked brand new. And she ironed them. I know this because, technically, I share an apartment with her, though I don’t use it much since Lensky bought his condo.

  The really annoying thing was that even dressed like somebody’s maiden aunt, she was a knockout. There’d been fender-benders on the Drag caused by students appreciating her figure, and the coronet of braids framed an icy but perfect face.

  “Thanks, but I don’t need a doughnut,” Ingrid said. “I drove in today.”

  She’d been doing that a lot in the last couple of months. I wondered if she too had been having nightmares.

  She glanced around the room. “Isn’t Mr. M. coming?”

  “Technically, he’s not a research fellow. And he gets drowsy in the cold weather. He’s taking another nap.”

  She smiled faintly. “Probably just as well. If you gave him any coffee he might start singing in the middle of the meeting.”

  Dr. Verrick stumped to the head of the table and regarded the four of us with the expression of a man who’s requested a SEAL team and received four of the Seven Dwarfs. At an age somewhere between seventy and a hundred and ten (none of us had the nerve to ask), you’d think he would have got used to people not living up to his expectations.

  “In a few minutes,” Dr. Verrick announced, “you will have the opportunity to meet a young man who will be interning with the research department this semester. He will, of course, receive significantly less than a full research fellow’s stipend.”

  That was an eyebrow-raiser. Considering the beggarly stipends he allotted full-fledged research fellows, the only way an intern could receive significantly less was if he paid for the privilege of working with us. And nobody was that crazy, unless…

  “Oh, God,” I said involuntarily, “Tell me it’s not Vern Trexler.”

  “Staff selection is entirely my prerogative,” Dr. Verrick said, and paused long enough for me to have one of those near-death experiences where your whole life zips past your eyes. I hadn’t had nearly enough life for this to take more than a couple of seconds; I was kind of counting on another fifty or sixty years of experiences to stockpile before getting to this bit.

  “But no, Miss Kostis, the person I have in mind is not Mr. Trexler, but rather an exceptionally talented dissertation candidate who requires a brief sabbatical from his formal work.” I swear he enjoyed watching me start to melt down. Trexler – well, that’s another story. Not, praise gods and little stars, part of this one.

  Nobody had ever suggested the Center for Applied Topology as a rest cure for troubled minds. We were more likely to shatter minds than heal them. Ben made that point and Dr. Verrick said testily,

  “Exactly what gave you the impression that Mr. Bhatia was seeking a rest cure? I expect he will work harder here than he has in the entire rest of his academic career, and it will do him good.”

  “Prakash Bhatia? That Bhatia?” Ingrid exclaimed. Maybe she knew the guy from graduate school. I’d have to get any juicy details out of her as soon as the meeting was over.

  “Yes, that Bhatia,” Dr. Verrick confirmed. He went on to tell us that at this late stage in his studies, Prakash Bhatia had begun experiencing the minor, disturbing incidents that had drawn all of us – the research fellows, anyway – to the Center. Unlike us, though, he was determined to deny that anything unusual was going on. He hadn’t collected all the spades in play during a bridge game and spread them out in order on the table, somebody
was playing conjuring games. He didn’t correct a research paper without touching it, he’d just forgotten that he had already edited it on the computer. And so forth and so on.

  Continuous denial of reality is not good for the mind. Dr. Verrick hoped that being in contact with four research fellows who routinely did things a lot more amazing than messing with hands of cards would help Prakash Bhatia to accept the reality of his talent. But taking him in for this semester was not a work of charity; this young man had a lot to contribute to our work, if he could just let go of his crippling certainties.

  He dismissed us back to our offices, saying that we should be prepared to interview the new intern in a few minutes. And that refusing to accept the appointment was not an option. We were going to work with Bhatia for a semester. Instead of giving him a conventional interview, he expected us to explain the structure and work of the Center for Applied Technology.

  2. We try not to disturb normal people

  Once we were back on the private side, I accepted my own bit of reality. If this wasn’t really an interview, then we might as well talk to this Bhatia as a group; maybe that would make him less likely to dismiss any one research fellow’s claims. And my office was the only one large enough for all four of us to sit in. I suggested to Ben and Colton that they drag in some extra chairs.

  This was going to be an extra chore for afterwards, putting those chairs back where they came from. As I may have mentioned, my strategy for discouraging visitors was not having anything around for them to sit on.

  I should probably explain about the private side. You may have gathered that we try not to disturb normal people by accidentally giving them glimpses of our research results.

  Ben and I, in our fourth year of studying with Dr. Verrick, had been the first to discover that we could make strange little things happen in the real world by visualizing some topological theorems or constructs and mentally linking them with real objects or places. Fortunately for us, Dr. Verrick was every bit as loyal to the undergraduates in his Topology Honors Program as to the graduate students whom he guided through comprehensives, qualifiers, and dissertation. He believed us! Not only that; he wrote letters and pulled strings and created a place for us: the Center for Applied Topology, funded by a semi-anonymous intelligence agency, housed by the University of Texas. UT generously gave us a space nobody else wanted: the third floor of Allandale House, a Victorian mansion incongruously sitting among UT’s buildings and protected by the terms of Chester Allandale’s will.