“What did you have in mind?”
“Using your primary expertise. A bomb. Can you manage that?”
Perhaps he would destroy this hotel at the same time. No, destroy the Center, get paid, and then let Chayyaputra learn how unwise it was to annoy Sandru Balan.
“Of course I can ‘manage’ it.” You fool, you take your life in your hands when you talk to Sandru Balan like this. I’ll have your money first, and then…
“Then do so. Quickly. I tire of this game.”
Prakash Bhatia found it nearly impossible to go to sleep on that Thursday night. His whole world had been turned upside down. The feats he had dismissed as “smoke and mirrors” were real. And the unimpressive girl he’d considered not worthy of his attention had turned into a heroine – and then she’d left him, flat, without any discussion of their relationship. She’d put herself at risk to save his life! She couldn’t be indifferent to him. Women played these games for obscure reasons of their own, but the fact remained. She was an overlooked jewel. His jewel; that man Lensky could not properly appreciate her qualities. Only he could do that.
He spent some hours recalling each of their interactions in detail. There was not actually that much to recall; he had been avoiding the Center. But he relived every word, every interchange. He’d been appallingly rude to her – but that was forgivable; unknowing, he’d been fighting an attraction he had not consciously recognized. He would explain that to her in the morning.
By the time he actually slept, Prakash was convinced not only that he loved Thalia, but that he had loved her from the moment they met. Fate had brought them together; what he might have overlooked, Fate had underlined by arranging for her to save his life; if she didn’t yet recognize that their lives were bound together, it was only because she had not had time to accept that fact. He would have to save her from her foolish attachment to Lensky.
And he would have to do that while learning a twisted, sideways mathematics that defied reality, while mastering powers he’d never dreamed of possessing.
It was a weighty task, but he had no doubt of his eventual success. Hadn’t he graduated with honors first from Indian Institute of Technology and then from Tata Institute? That was competition, all those hungry, brilliant minds vying for top marks. This Lensky was nothing; Prakash’s only real adversary was Thalia herself, with her misguided loyalty to a man who did not deserve her.
“You shouldn’t have stayed up,” I said.
I really meant, “I wish to God you hadn’t stayed up waiting for me, because I haven’t figured out how to minimize what happened.” I don’t lie to Lensky unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. Tonight’s debacle, I reluctantly decided, did not meet that criterion. Besides, Prakash would probably talk tomorrow.
Lensky’s lips compressed when I got to the part about teleporting to Littlefield Fountain. I hadn’t even mentioned Balan yet!
Well – no help for it. I rushed through the incident at the fountain while emphasizing that I had been in no danger whatsoever. (Not a lie. Just a little shading of the truth. Right?)
“If you’re going to yell at me,” I said, “I wish you would go on and get it over with.” The look on his face suggested that this fight was going to be a doozy.
“I’m not,” he said, surprising me. “For once, I’ll concede that this wasn’t your fault – except for teleporting to a destination where you could be attacked. And I do see how you could have overlooked that in the heat of the moment.”
His face was still set in stone.
“You’re furious, aren’t you?”
“No,” he said, surprising me even more. “This expression you see is me not saying, ‘I told you so.’ Speaking of temptation, I take it Bhatia behaved himself?”
“Um – eventually.” Discounting that torrid kiss at the end, which Lensky really didn’t need to hear about, did he? “Initially,” I confessed, “he had the wrong idea, just as you predicted. But I set him straight.”
Lensky cracked a smile. “I bet you did. How many fingers is he missing? Oh, and by the way, did he concede that what you do is real?”
“He was shaken up enough to do that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if by tomorrow he has decided it was all a bad dream.”
“Me too.” He wrapped his arms around me. “My bad dream. Remember? You were teleporting into danger, and you never came back. You were damned close to not coming back this time. I just hope this was what the dream was about.” He took my shoulders and held me away from him, far enough that I could see his face. “You need to be very, very careful. What happened shows that Balan has teamed up with the Master of Ravens – and despite there being no clue in the name this time, it has to be Shani Chayyaputra.”
“You did say you’d back the Mathematical Mafia against the Master of Ravens.”
“That was before Balan joined up with him. I don’t know what the two of them could do together, and I don’t want to find out the hard way.” He gathered me close again, very gently. “The worst way. Thalia… I don’t know what I’d do if he hurt you. I don’t even want to imagine it.”
Then he took me to bed and made love to me very carefully, as if he was afraid I’d break. “You’re precious to me,” he murmured. “So precious… If you won’t take care for yourself, Thalia, will you at least take care of what I love?”
12. The Wrath of Thalia
On Friday morning I got a call that temporarily made me forget all about the adventure of the night before. Not that it mattered: I was sure Lensky and Prakash between them would fill everybody in.
“Thalia! Andros didn’t come home last night.” Mom sounded as if she was crying.
“Maybe he stayed over with a friend and forgot to tell you? I did that a few times and you never got upset.” So okay, those times I was with Rick, not with a girlfriend. She didn’t need to know that.
“You always told me when you were going to sleep over with a friend!” Actually, I hadn’t, but we didn’t need to go into that either.
Maybe Andros had a girlfriend. I asked about that.
“Of course not! He’s just a baby. Besides, I would know.”
Right. Just like she’d known I was spending nights with that rat Rick, my senior year.
If Dad made a habit of belittling Andros and telling him he’d never be a man, I thought Andros might have acquired a girlfriend just to show him.
Mom drew a long shaky breath. “He was here last night. He must have sneaked out when we were asleep. And he took a backpack full of clothes with him.”
“You’re sure about that?” I’d seen Andros’ room. Teenage boy, right? Enough said.
“Thalia! I know every stitch he owns. I bought all his clothes. And I do his laundry.”
All right, now I was beginning to share her concern. “Mom. Did he and Dad have another fight last night?”
“What are you talking about? Andros is a good boy. He never raises his voice to his father.” She paused. “Yanni might have spoken a little harshly to him. You know he’s worried about Andros.”
She meant my father Yanni, not my oldest brother Yanni. I’d seen how my father expressed his ‘worry.’ He’d done the same thing to me, and we’d had explosive fights before I learned to ignore him. Andros never had fought back. Maybe he also had never learned to ignore the constant criticisms as I had. I knew they were getting to him; that had been obvious at Friday night dinner. I began to be worried. Mom could be right, he might have run away. But admitting my concern to her wouldn’t help.
“Why don’t you try calling his friends? The ones you know about. “Even if he’s not staying with one of them, they might have some idea how to find him.”
After another fifteen minutes of going over the same information, Mom was finally sufficiently reassured to promise she’d do that and to let me go.
When I finally got off the phone, Ingrid was hovering in my office door, looking worried. “Can it wait for a minute? I need to do one more thing.” I typed a quick text to Andros�
�� come to think of it, Mom might not even know he had his own phone. I’d set up the account for him last year, since Dad wouldn’t do it.
“Where are you? Mom’s worried sick and so am I. ANSWER THIS or face the Wrath of Thalia.” I sent that off and set my phone to give me a very loud alarm if I received a text message.
“Okay, what’s the problem, Ingrid?” And who made me the official fixer of everybody else’s problems? Ingrid was the oldest of us – unless you counted Prakash, which I was not quite ready to do.
Of course, I knew the answer. Ingrid was so buttoned-up that nobody felt free to bring personal problems to her.
“Nothing,” she said now. “I – is everything all right? You sounded worried.”
“I am. But it’s nothing you can fix. My idiot little brother seems to have run away from home. Chances are he’ll be back tonight, but Mom’s hysterical.”
“Oh – well…” She stopped and started over, but it felt like a complete change of topic. “I just wanted to ask, how did it go last night?”
In the middle of filling her in my phone beeped, so I wrapped up with, “Tell you the rest later. The important thing is – Balan is working with the Master of Ravens. So watch out!”
I looked at my phone before she was even out of the office. Andros had texted back to say that he was okay but not to tell Mom and Dad where he was.
“How can I, idiot, you didn’t even tell me!” I counted backwards from twenty and then composed a new text. “I won’t tell. WHERE ARE YOU?”
My phone didn’t beep for the rest of the morning, so I had plenty of time to warn everybody about Balan and the Master of Ravens and to observe the new, improved Prakash. He was actually in the office we’d made available to him – I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘his’ office yet, he’d hardly used it. But today he was there, and drawing illustrations of the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem on the whiteboard. (You can’t exactly illustrate the theorem, but you can look at individual examples, sort of. That’s what we do when teleporting.)
“Nothing works,” he complained when I looked in. “I am studying to the maximum, and it is not working!”
Well, it was sort of my job to help him learn, and maybe it would keep my mind off Andros until he texted back. I studied his drawings.
“Umm, maybe these are too abstract.” Hard to be anything else, if you insist on illustrating an existence proof without denoting what it is that exists. I made a quick sketch on the last unused corner of the whiteboard, showing a crumpled sheet of paper touching a flat sheet at just one point. I added arrows labeling the crumpled sheet as “Destination” and the flat one as “Origin,” and the point where they touched as “You.”
“Why not use flat one as destination?”
“You can do that. But when you need to teleport in a hurry – like last night – it helps if you always use the same image, so you can visualize it instantaneously.”
Instead of calling me an idiot who didn’t understand reciprocal relationships, he actually nodded and said, “I see. But last night…”
“What were you visualizing then?”
“Nothing… Well, something like you were describing. But if one example works, all should work! Is not logical!” He sounded frustrated. Well, the fact is not much of what we do is all that logical, but I didn’t want to upset him even more by explaining that.
“I know. Look, let’s practice some real short moves using this example, and when you know exactly how it feels, you could do some research on what visualizations work and if they have anything in common? Original research,” I added to sweeten the suggestion. “We haven’t done much work on the theoretical underpinnings of what we do.” Having been too busy getting threatened and shot at and involuntarily teleported and… well. No need to scare him off by a quick recital of Center history. In context, last night hadn’t been that unusual.
We worked on triggering the crumpled-paper example by the keyword “Brouwer,” and then did some very quick teleports over very short distances – basically limiting the destinations to what he could see from where he was standing, to make it easier.
“Hey, Thalia! You want to go to lunch? And you too, Prakash,” Ben added in what was clearly an afterthought.
“No, I wish to stay here only and work on what Thalia has been showing me.”
Ben waited until we were outside before raising his eyebrows. “Where is the Blessed Prakash and how did you replace him with this alien?”
“I think last night shook him up a little. Shook him enough to let a tiny bit of light in.”
“More than a tiny bit, seems to me. He’s actually working. And being polite.”
I laughed. “Learning some manners would be a definite improvement. Last night…” I told him about Prakash of the Many Hands. “The amount of hands-on ‘work’ he was trying to do, I felt like I was with one of those Indian gods with twelve arms! I didn’t want to discuss that in the office because, well, I kind of minimized that problem with Lensky. At the moment he’s not mad at me and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Fair enough. Do you want me to join in on tutoring him after lunch? It might not be such a great idea for you to be alone in an office with the guy, if he’s that grabby.”
“Oh, I think I knocked all that nonsense out of him last night.” Except for that Hollywood-style kiss at the end, and the announcement that Fate had bound us together. Oh well, he’d had a night to simmer down and get over that, and this morning he hadn’t said or done anything out of line. I figured that particular problem was taken care of.
“Seeing it was you, I’m surprised he has a hand left to grab with, then!”
What was it with Lensky, and now Ben? I am a mild and peaceable person. Despite the rumor Ben keeps trying to start, I do not keep a cleaver in my top desk drawer to discourage people from coming in and interrupting me. Not having any chairs for visitors works almost as well.
And Andros had had three hours to text me his location, and he hadn’t done it.
When we got back from lunch I was temporarily distracted from that problem. It was clear why Ingrid and Colton had skipped lunch; they had been putting the finishing touches on their project.
When Ben and I got to the third floor, Ingrid was sort of doing the reverse of teleportation and stepping from the floor into the air. To be precise, she and Colton were holding hands and swooping through the big central room at the head of the stairs, a good five feet above the floor.
“You made it work? You made it work!”
“Not really,” Ingrid called as she swooped by us and did a neat little spiral turn ballasted by Colton’s hand. “It turns out to be a completely different topological construct. Nothing at all to do with path-connected spaces! I just thought of it last night.”
“And I,” Colton said, grinning like a fool as he did a sort of breast stroke through the air, “just implemented it.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You mean you can do it on your own? Without Ingrid?”
Ingrid folded her arms and shot down to an almost normal position facing me. “We’re just starting. But I think Colton is going to be even better at this than I will.”
Theoretically, any one of us can work any transformation that any other one figures out. But it’s true that in practice, we tend to have our specialities. I’d been the first one to use a visualization of the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem – well, a lemma of that theorem, to be technical – to teleport, and I could still use it faster and more easily than any of my colleagues. Ben’s specialties were shielding and camouflage; Ingrid’s was telekinesis. And it appeared that Colton was going to be our aerial acrobat.
Now, as Ingrid shook out the clusters of stars on her fingers and took to the air again, Mr. M decided to serenade us all.
“For you, young Ben,” he screeched, and launched into “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” Ben’s jaw clenched. He was still living down his experiments of last fall, when an attempt to generate light via Riemann surfaces had inst
ead generated fire, automatic sprinklers, and evacuation of the building. He and I had taken apart the relevant mathematics since then, but we’d never been able to get light without fire. That had come in handy for me last night, but in general it got us into more trouble than not. That’s why I’m not going to go into the details of how it works; where would we be, I ask you, if the math department were filled with ambitious topologists starting fires at random? I really think Dr. Verrick ought to give us credit for keeping Riemann fire under wraps, next time he accuses us all of being socially irresponsible.
“You had to bring him in today, Annelise?” Ben grumbled.
“He gets bored when he’s alone in the apartment.”
Ingrid and Colton were still swooping giddily around the room, slowly losing altitude. Mr. M. announced that his next number, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me)” was going out to Jimmy DiGrazio, whose girlfriend was apparently planning to perch in the apple tree with Colton. Mr. M.’s sense of humor tends to be pointed and not particularly kind. We all knew that Jimmy was already insecure about Ingrid’s collaboration with Colton.
Fortunately for Jimmy’s peace of mind, Mr. M. picked on Colton next. “And for the one unattached member of the Center: “I’ve got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle,” he crooned. I didn’t think Colton was particularly glad he was single, having struck out with Annelise some time ago. He had been eyeing Meadow recently, but like any man with a decent sense of self-preservation, he’d been taking it very slowly.
It was Annelise who finally got our daring young research fellows back down to earth. Their shoes were scraping the floor but they still weren’t giving up. She brought the pastry tray out of the break room and waved it at them. “Doughnuts! Chocolate covered, cream filled, raspberry filled! Get them while they’re fresh!”
Ingrid and Colton must have burnt up a lot of energy with this flying discovery; they swooped towards the tray and Colton tried to snatch a doughnut. Annelise dodged him. “Sit down and eat like grownups!” She put the tray in the middle of the break room table and the fliers descended on it like grackles sighting a discarded sandwich. I wouldn’t have described the subsequent orgy of snatching, cramming and gulping as “eating like grownups,” but at least they had their seats in the chairs and their feet under the table. Some days that’s the best you can hope for out of our research fellows.
An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3) Page 9