An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  It wasn’t a bad apartment. Certainly it was a vast improvement on Ben’s previous lodging, which had been about the size of a postage stamp. Apart from being larger and cleaner, well, what do you say about apartments? “It looks nice,” is better than “You signed a lease on this?” and that sums up my social understanding.

  Actually, thanks to the fact that they couldn’t afford much furniture, the place looked positively roomy. The living room held a couple of beanbag chairs, a flat-screen TV, and a card table for party snacks where we gathered after duly admiring the luxury of a separate kitchen and a dining nook.

  Lensky hung up our coats and Mr. M., not a fan of cold weather, slowly slithered out of my belt loops.

  All right. You may have thought Mr. M. was a person, and that’s more or less correct. He certainly has plenty of personality. But it’s also true that he is a Babylonian turtle mage who, after the accidental destruction of his turtle shell, makes do with a prosthetic robot snake body for transportation. I know, I know, it’s hard to picture. You’re probably still shaking your head over my assertion that some people can do magic via just the right kind of pure mathematics visualized in just the right way. And that’s a lot easier to accept than a compound complex being made up of a box turtle head and a prosthetic snake body.

  A three-thousand-year old box turtle head.

  Now, thanks to our robotics engineer Meadow Melendez, equipped with GPS, wi-fi, and focused ultrasonic beam capability.

  Well, I can’t help it. Mr. M. exists. He survived a beheading that freed him from a magic-quenching ring, persuaded Meadow to give him one of her spare robot snake bodies, and has since impressed the force of his personality on everyone associated with the Center for Applied Technology. Without him we wouldn’t have had nearly so many dramatic applications of topology. As I’ve mentioned, his infinite set of “stars” allowed serious amplification of the results we got from applying topology to problems. Each research fellow of the Center now has a personal infinite set of stars. (See, that’s a very practical use of mathematics. Half of an infinite set is… an infinite set. We could keep subdividing the stars forever without running out.) We owed him a lot… and he liked to party. Naturally I brought him along.

  The fact that nearly half our staff now consisted of non-mathematicians saved the party. Instead of a huddle of topologists staring at their shoes, we had topologists intermixed with Jimmy, Meadow, Lensky, and, of course, Annelise. We still stared at our shoes to begin with, of course, but after enough champagne had flowed we began to act almost normally party-ish.

  I asked Meadow if she’d come up with any interesting augmentations for Mr. M. She grinned and said we’d see in due course, but what she planned to do next was a fan-(obscenity)-tastic augmentation and she felt sorry for the next bunch of (blasphemy) terrorists who had the bad judgment to tangle with the greatest warrior snake-turtle in the (extremely coarse obscenity) history of the turtle race.

  Colton looked unhappy. “Why do you always talk like that, Meadow? You’re much too pretty to talk so ugly.”

  “I am not pretty,” she snapped, “and it’s none of your (obscenity) business how I (expletive deleted) talk.” Actually, she wasn’t bad-looking, but ‘pretty’ wasn’t part of her self-image. Her way of dealing with being a short Hispanic woman in a department full of engineering students was to adopt the personality of a tank, and she had the build to do it – especially given her choice of loose, bulky sweaters that did what they could to conceal her figure.

  Extreme self-confidence was a feature, not a bug, in her case; without it, she’d never have dared to attempt joining Mr. M’s severed head to a snake-robot body. Not only that, she kept augmenting the capabilities of that body.

  I edged away from them before Colton could say anything nice to her again; I didn’t want to be anywhere close to the potential explosion.

  Lensky was being as useless as a mathematician at this party, or at least as quiet as one; he hardly spoke at all and barely touched the snacks. Mostly he leaned against the wall and stared into his glass.

  “Have you noticed how many grackles there are around Allandale House lately?” I asked Ben. It was something of a non sequitur; I’m not good at small talk. Neither are any of the other researchers, of course.

  Ben, for instance, took that as an invitation to explain to me that there really weren’t that many grackles, they were just more conspicuous because most of the other birds in Austin had sensibly gone south. Furthermore, since they weren’t breeding at this season, they had nothing much to do but wheel in the sky and perch in the trees over open areas like the South Mall or the grounds of Allandale House. Their habits…

  Ben double-majored in mathematics and biology, and he hasn’t quite recovered from the biology part. I slithered away from that monologue on the excuse of getting another glass of champagne. I waved brightly at Lensky from the kitchen counter that had been designated as a temporary bar, emptied my glass as soon as I caught his eye, and refilled it.

  There was definitely something wrong with the man. He was passing up an opportunity to interfere with me having another drink. Despite the fact that I’m only five foot three and about ninety pounds, I can actually have more than one glass of champagne without becoming falling-down drunk, but Lensky has some trouble grasping that concept.

  Ingrid looked unhappy too. I poured a second glass of champagne and shimmied along the wall until I reached her.

  “You look as though you need something to drown your sorrows.”

  “Oh. It’s nothing.” Ingrid emptied the champagne flute in one gulp and handed it back to me. The braids wrapped around her head seemed to be trying to escape; when she wasn’t holding a glass, she kept absent-mindedly trying to poke hairpins back into her coronet of silvery fair hair.

  After a second bout of champagne therapy, she complained to me that Jimmy was being weird about her new project.

  “Flying? But it’s not just you, it’s all of us. Well, you and Colton are doing most of the work.”

  “But it’ll never be Jimmy,” Ingrid said morosely. “Up to now he’s been okay about the fact that I can do some things he can’t, but…”

  “He’s always thought the stuff you could do was beyond cool.” This shift in his attitude surprised me. “I should have thought he’d find flying even cooler than our other stuff.”

  “He doesn’t like me working so much with Colton,” Ingrid blurted. “He got upset because I was so excited that we’ve actually managed to get in the air for a few seconds.”

  “You have? Congratulations!”

  “Apparently Jimmy doesn’t share that feeling. Remember how Lensky was about you and Ben last fall?”

  “To be fair, he had some excuse for leaping to his conclusions, mistaken though they were. As far as I know, Jimmy hasn’t discovered you and Colton sleeping in the same bed. However innocently,” I added just to make sure she remembered that there’d been nothing going on with Ben and me except exhaustion after a harrowing ordeal.

  Ingrid shoved a few more escaping hairpins back into her pile of blonde braids. “All the same…Thalia, you’re in a committed relationship with an outsider. How do you make it work?”

  “The first step,” Jimmy said, behind her, “is agreeing that you are committed to the relationship. I haven’t heard a lot from you about that. And these days all I hear about is how much you want to do the aerial waltz with that farm boy.”

  Sheesh. If Colton made him jealous, I wondered what his reaction to Prakash would be. As our resident computer nerd, rather than a research fellow, he hadn’t been exposed to the Blessed Prakash yet.

  Ingrid turned faintly pink around the edges. “Jimmy, not here!”

  “Reassure me,” Jimmy said.

  “How?”

  “We could be engaged, for a start. Or better, married. Unless you’re too chicken to make a commitment.”

  Ingrid patted her braids. I had the feeling that she was mentally putting on her horned helmet. �
�I am not afraid of anything!” she announced in ringing tones. “I’m not afraid of flying, I’m not afraid of you, and I’m certainly not afraid to make a commitment!”

  “Great! We’ll get married at spring break!”

  “June. If we’re getting married, you have something else to do over spring break.”

  “I do?”

  Ingrid’s smile had some elements of the shark sensing blood. “Meeting my mother. Again.”

  She swanned off towards the champagne while Jimmy turned so pale green that all his freckles stood out. It wasn’t a good look for him. But I could understand. He’d met Ingrid’s mother once before, as a colleague rather than as a future husband, and he’d said it was one of those occasions when your whole life passes before your eyes.

  Hmm. I had the feeling I’d just watched somebody being very adroitly manipulated. The only question was, which one of them had been doing the manipulating?

  I still hadn’t made up my mind on that when Mr. M. decided to serenade the happy couple with “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to.” It would have been OK if he’d stopped there. But he went on to give us a bravura interpretation of “Beer Barrel Polka,” followed by “Der Führer’s Face” – complete with raspberries, and how a being with a beak instead of lips could do that is something I don’t want to think about. Last fall he’d been into sentimental nineteenth century songs; now he’d moved on to the Big Band era and the second world war. In a sense this was progress; if he kept moving forward in time, he’d eventually get to classic rock, music I actually liked.

  Then again, I’m not sure the world is ready for a turtle head with a synthetic snake body belting out, “Sharp Dressed Man.”

  “Did anybody give him coffee?” I whispered to Ingrid. Caffeine had a known effect on Mr. M.; that’s why we tried to keep it away from him. But I hadn’t seen any coffee at this party.

  She shook her head. “But I think Annelise poured some champagne in a saucer for him. She said something about not wanting him to feel left out.”

  “That girl is too tender-hearted for her own good. Or maybe for my own good. She gets him drunk and I have to take him home and get him to sleep.”

  “You could leave him here.”

  Mr. M. sounded ready to go for the rest of the night. I was tempted. Sorely tempted. But when Lensky held my coat, he stopped singing to squawk, slither across the floor, and start working up my leg. I was wearing a skirt, so I picked him up before this got too intimate. He coiled himself around my waist, hiccupping and asserting that he was the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C.

  By the time we got home he was asleep.

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

  “Okay, give. All evening you've been looking like somebody stole your ice cream cone. What's the matter? I'd have thought you'd be delighted that Ben and Annelise were moving in together.”

  “I'm happy for them, hope it works out well,” Lensky said, so mechanically that it was clear his mind was on something quite different.

  “You're not even thinking about them. What's bothering you?”

  He sighed heavily and began unlacing his shoes. “Thalia, you know there are aspects of my work that I can't share with you.”

  I pulled my silk shirt over my head and stepped out of my skirt. Lensky didn't even look up. And here I was wearing a new camisole and knickers set, silk with lace inserts. Kind of a deep rose color. And apparently wasted on this occasion. “Is this one of those aspects? Tell me straight out that whatever's worrying you is too classified for me to hear about, and I'll quit bugging you.” If only because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

  Lensky has problems with telling me a direct lie. That would seem to be a bug, not a feature, for somebody working for an agency so secretive that he wasn't supposed to say its name; but when I asked him about it once he said that it was only me he had trouble lying to, he didn't have any problem lying to the idiots and lowlifes he recruited as informants.

  Well, a girl likes to feel special. But now I was exploiting my “special” status to pressure Lensky, and I didn't much like myself for that.

  It worked, though. He met my eyes and sighed. “No, in fact the Agency has been leaning on me to enlist the Center’s help on this, and - I don't like it. I don't want you anywhere near this. Just because you've seen him…”

  “It's about Blondie.”

  “Yes. I told you there'd been chatter placing him in Austin? Now one of my assets has linked him with an Austin businessman, says they've met at the bar in the Driskill more than once recently. Of course he, the informant, hasn't actually seen Blondie. He's going on that sketch our people put together after San Antonio. To verify the connection, they - we - would like somebody who would recognize Blondie to have a look at one of these meetings. I can…”

  “You can not waltz off and try to surveil Blondie!” I interrupted. “It's too dangerous. He knows what you look like now!”

  “If my theories about having crossed his path in Romania are correct, he’s known that for several years.”

  “Doesn’t make it any safer for you now.”

  “I've been trying to persuade my asset to take pictures next time, but he doesn't have the nerve. He's heard - stories - about what Blondie does to people who cross him.”

  “Well, there's a much easier solution.” Here was a chance to actually be of some real help to Lensky, using known applications of topology. “Have your asset phone me next time he sees Blondie. I'll teleport to the hotel, raise Camouflage as soon as I'm there, and observe. If it is Blondie… well, I don't know whether I can take a picture of his companion through Camouflage, I need to run some tests.”

  “Confirmation that it's Blondie will be all we need, we already know who the other guy is,” Lensky said absently, “Shani Chayyaputra, new in town, venture capitalist, something to do with computers…wait a minute. You can't do this either, Thalia. He knows what you look like.”

  “So what?” I said. “He won't even see me. No wonder the Agency's been leaning on you; this is exactly the kind of little thing where our special abilities can be most effective. Don't you see? You can't verify that it's Blondie, because he might see you. Your informant can't verify him beyond saying he looks like the sketch, and we both know it's not so great.” The artist had captured Blondie's close-cropped pale blond hair, his cold gray eyes and thin nose, but had somehow failed to convey the tension and sense of danger that Blondie radiated. “But I can verify safely, using Camouflage. He'll never even know I was there.”

  “Right, he won't… because you won't be there. I'm not letting you do this.”

  There's a point at which there's just no use arguing with Lensky any longer. It's like his mind turns into quick-setting cement. So I didn't push it then. I worried, though. Because I felt sure that Lensky would want to observe the next meeting between Blondie and the other guy, and although I could have done so safely, he would be in danger. His Agency had probably taught him all sorts of little tricks for being inconspicuous and not easily recognizable, but all those tricks put together wouldn't be nearly as good as the cloak of invisibility I could throw over myself.

  Perhaps I could persuade him to take one of the other topologists to the Driskill. That way, with somebody holding Camouflage over the two of them, he could observe the meeting as safely as I could have.

  Or perhaps I could go at the problem from a different angle.

  On Monday we got our first experience of working with Prakash. If you can call it working. He kept interrupting our attempts to explain and demonstrate our abilities to talk about how much mathematics he knew, how well he’d done at the Tata Institute and his triumphs before that at the Delhi branch of the Indian Institute for Technology. We hadn’t yet heard about how he aced the IIT entrance exams, but I felt sure that was coming soon.

  “He’s intolerably condescending,” I griped to Colton Edwards during a quiet moment in the break room.

  “I think he’s terrified,” Colt
on said thoughtfully. “If his own paranormal activities were enough to throw him into total denial, how much more frightening must it be to get tossed in with us? I expect he’s afraid that if he lets us get a word in edgewise, we’ll present him with evidence that he can’t deny.”

  “There you go again, making the rest of us look bad by being such a nice guy. Are you going to take the last apple fritter?”

  “Do you think I’m such a nice guy that I’ll give it to you? I’m not that obliging,” said Colton, cramming the thing into his mouth.

  While he was chewing, I asked if he had any suggestions for reducing Prakash’s putative terror.

  “He barely knows us,” Colton said after he finished off the apple fritter. “Why don’t we invite him to join us for lunch? Maybe he’ll relax a little in an informal setting.”

  It was, thus, entirely Colton’s fault that the four of us were breathing fire after lunch that day. Instead of grabbing a sandwich or burger at the Student Union, we’d walked a few blocks down Guadalupe to a combination Indian restaurant and grocery store that Prakash liked.

  “Recommendations?” Ben asked him.

  “Everything here is good,” Prakash said, “but I am vegetarian, so I can personally recommend vegetarian dishes only. I suggest you request special mild version of whatever you order. Indian food is very spicy.”

  “We all trained on jalapeño nachos,” Ben said, “that won’t be an issue.”

  Seldom has there been such a wildly inaccurate prediction. And yes, I’m including the TV weatherman who kept promising a cold front all through last August.

  Slightly less than an hour later, we were back on the Drag; four topologists taking deep gasps of the nice cool January air, and one shivering but smug intern. “So, how you are liking Indian food?”