A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  That would clash with the pink napkins.

  We were having pink napkins?

  “Ok, how about pink, then? To go with the napkins?”

  What should we do for wedding favors? At Calla’s daughter’s wedding they had given everybody a little model of the Parthenon, but Mom thought that was kind of strange and anyway, she didn’t know where she could get a hundred and eighty Parthenons.

  A hundred and eighty guests?

  This thing was getting way out of hand.

  “Can’t we just do little bags of koufeta?” No Greek wedding was complete without the sugar-coated almonds.

  Mom sighed. “Of course you’re having koufeta. In bowls on the table. Don’t you remember? I told you just last week. So we need something else.”

  “We could skip the bowls on the table, then almonds would be fine for the favors.”

  Another deep sigh. “If you want your father to look cheap. It’s your wedding. Did I mention that Calla and Kosmos gave out little models of the Parthenon? How about—” Mom ran through half a dozen other ideas for wedding favors, most of them so outrageous that I finally agreed to the suggestion of miniature Greek goddess statues. Even then more decisions were required.

  If we had to do goddess statues I’d actually have preferred Athena, but Mom nixed that suggestion in favor of Aphrodite. The whole thing seemed dangerously pagan for a wedding that was to be celebrated in a Greek Orthodox church, but at least we wouldn’t be distributing the goddesses inside the church. I suspected she was pushing Aphrodite because of the fertility symbolism; in Mom’s view, getting married was like firing a starter pistol in the grandchildren race. I was kind of counting on the Pill to defeat ancient goddesses of fertility.

  “Guest list for what? The shower? I’m not having a wedding shower!”

  Evidently I was now.

  Mom kept going for over an hour. However, it’s an ill wind and all that; by the time I got off the phone, the others had all finished eating. I made a sandwich of the leftover sliced turkey (dry, and the bread was so healthy it crunched) and took it back to my room. I wouldn’t have to face the entire crew until the official beginning of the retreat, tomorrow morning.

  And I even snagged a cupcake for Mr. M., who likes sugar almost as much as caffeine and doesn’t get nearly as hyper on it.

  2. Two truths and a lie

  Wimberley, Monday

  I woke long before breakfast, tense and nervous. To fill in the waiting time, I reviewed what we knew so far.

  The Center for Applied Topology had tangled with Shani Chayyaputra before, so we knew better than to underrate him; his magic and his command of grackles were formidable, as one would expect from a sinister god whose chosen vehicle was a large black bird. After the last debacle we’d taken a few steps to improve our defenses. Mr. M. had helped us devise shields that could be locked in place – not requiring a topologist continually visualizing a mathematical construct, which was the way we achieved most of our paranormal effects - and that would prevent anybody except Center staff from teleporting into our offices and homes. Unlocking the shields was a more complicated issue, which is why we still used temporary personal shields elsewhere.

  We’d hoped that he would stop attacking the Center, and so far we’d been lucky. The problem was that he was still doing things we couldn’t, in good conscience, ignore. At least not after they became personal with Jimmy DiGrazio’s friend Logan.

  Naturally Jimmy, our resident computer nerd, hung out with similarly minded nerds outside the Center. One of them was Logan, who had recently started a company called Protect Your Privacy. Supposedly he hoped to market something called zero-knowledge proofs. Jimmy had explained the concept exhaustively to all the Center’s research fellows, aka topological magicians. We still didn’t understand how it worked; all we got was that it was a way to authenticate your identity – you know, that information every Web site tries to hoover up – without revealing private data. Like your email address.

  The problem was that so far, every implementation of the algorithm used way too much memory and computing power to be practical for personal computers. But two of Jimmy’s other friends, Will and Eli, had specialized in mathematical computing and thought they were close to a solution for that problem. Logan had optimistically started his company in the hope of being first to market a zero-knowledge product.

  Then Will and Eli vanished.

  Because technical types seldom think about what can go wrong, Logan hadn’t bought key-person insurance.

  The company crumbled, and Logan was now deep in debt and seriously depressed.

  How did the Center’s research fellows get involved?

  To all appearance Will had simply walked out of the office one evening and never reached home. But Eli had vanished from a locked room leaving only a handful of grackle feathers on the floor. Grackle magic meant the Master of Ravens was involved (nobody has yet been able to convince grackles that they’re not related to ravens). And the Master of Ravens was currently living in Austin as Shani Chayyaputra. So we started looking into Chayyaputra’s most recent venture, a business called, with typical modesty, Shani Chayyaputra Investments, or SCI.

  All we’d learned so far was that Chayyaputra, as you might expect, was inordinately secretive. He barely interacted with his own staff; the company didn’t have a website; uninvited visitors were thrown out before they got farther than the lobby; and he never took vacations. (That last wasn’t so much a problem for us as an indication that he was up to something secret.)

  When he closed the company for a week to pursue urgent business in India, we found an opportunity. He was too paranoid to allow his small staff free rein in his absence, so he sent them all for a week of team-building exercises and personal growth at a retreat out in Wimberley. As soon as we heard about this plan, my colleagues had been insistent that I should go to the retreat undercover and see what I could find out from interacting with Chayyaputra’s employees. The first cover we’d been able to wangle was a temporary job for me as a waitress at Inner Light Guest House.

  Even as that was being organized Jimmy had kept talking about creating a better cover story for me and planting things in the media, but I’d barely had time to pack and drive down to the guest house after the job was arranged, so I hadn’t paid much attention.

  I was going to have to have a serious talk with Jimmy quite soon. But for now, I headed to the dining deck with other questions on my mind, the principal ones being, “How does destroying Logan’s little start-up company benefit Shani Chayyaputra? And what happened to Will and Eli?”

  I paused at the door to look over what I was stepping into. Six people. Great view. And nothing but granola and bluish skim milk on the serving buffet. Well, I was certainly getting some insight into how the Fosters turned a profit. Too bad that wasn’t one of my questions.

  While half of Shani’s employees were milling around and admiring the view (and putting off facing the granola) I secured a strategic seat in the middle of a bench at the picnic table. In retrospect, a place at one end might have been a better choice: easier to get away.

  Opposite me sat a guy who looked somewhat older than the others. Dark hair cut very short, narrow face, slightly squinty dark eyes. Not appealing. I was still fingering a spoon and steeling myself for granola with skim milk when he launched an attack.

  “It seems odd to me that we never heard about the boss planning to marry you.” He invested the last word with a snide intonation that seemed to convey “you, of all people.”

  “Shani is a very private person,” I said, and took a mouthful of granola to give myself time to think. I had more time than I really needed; the stuff combined a chewy texture with the taste of recycled cardboard. I chewed carefully while gazing over my attacker’s shoulder at massed greenery and the hint of a creek, dark and shiny behind the trees. It was a nice morning: cool for May but not overcast. It would probably get hotter later on, but just now it was perfect for breakfast on the deck
.

  “All the same,” the creep continued, “one article in a notorious gossip rag hardly seems like proof to me. Do you have any idea how many scandal stories Whirred had to retract last year?”

  I finally got that first mouthful of granola down. “No, should I?” Maybe it was time to go on the attack. “And I resent your characterizing my engagement as a scandal story.” I loaded my spoon again and looked at it dubiously. It didn’t seem like a good tactical plan to gag myself with more granola.

  “Oh, drop it, Webster. Sally spent a solid hour on the phone last night planning her wedding. She wouldn’t go through all the hassle of picking flowers and napkins and a coordinated color scheme if she weren’t stuck with an actual wedding to plan.” Ginny set a bowl of granola on the table and sat down next to me.

  “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. The walls are thin, but I took your wedding preparations as an Awful Warning. I’m planning to get married next year, and after hearing what you’re going through I think I’ll forget about the white wedding of my dreams. Maybe I can persuade Adrian to elope.”

  “So she’s planning a wedding,” Webster muttered, “but does Shani know about it?” But he dropped the subject when the other people started introducing themselves.

  Hien, the small dark girl who’d seated herself on my other side, was tech support. She was also even shorter than me. I liked her already.

  Chet and Ginny, financial analyst and office manager, I’d met on Sunday, and I felt that I already knew Webster better than I wanted to. The other two were Yung-Su Park and Alec Somebody, software analysts.

  “I sneaked a peek at Margo’s schedule,” Ginny announced ebulliently. “First we’re going to do a trust-building exercise—"

  “Oh, wonderful. I hope it’s not that thing where you fall backwards and hope the others catch you,” murmured Hien. I hoped so too, and I liked her even better for that comment.

  “And after that,” Ginny continued, “we’re going to play ‘Two Truths and a Lie,’ where each of us has to make three statements and the others have to guess which is the lie. Sally’s at a disadvantage because the rest of us are already acquainted, so let’s tell her about ourselves over breakfast.”

  Alec stared into his bowl and Yung-Su announced, “I am Korean. Not Chinese. Not Japanese. Korean.”

  “The Chinese-American community thanks you for that clarification,” Hien said under her breath.

  “And?” Ginny prompted Yung-Su after a lengthy pause.

  “That’s all.”

  He was awfully tall for a Korean, but apparently he didn’t plan to discuss that. Or anything else.

  “I don’t think y’all are getting the idea,” Ginny announced. “I’m Ginny, I’m going to marry Adrian next year, I hate rap music and I never met a meal I couldn’t like.”

  That much I could have deduced from the enthusiastic way she was spooning up the granola; what I couldn’t figure out was how she stayed so lanky.

  “Ha,” said Webster, “you should try field rations. Oh, I’m Webster and I served in the army, which is why I’m older and wiser than the rest of this crew.”

  “You think.” Hien was an enjoyable, if barely audible, chorus.

  The rest of the introductions washed over me. I was too busy trying to think of statements I could use for the next exercise, so I didn’t learn much about Chet, Hien and Alec. Oh well, it wasn’t like I was trying to win the stupid game. Not being exposed would be good enough for me… unless one of the crew accidentally revealed something about Chayyaputra’s reason for using black (bird) magic against a small start-up company. I hoped some of them would say something useful. Could I think of a statement – either “true” or “false”—that would elicit a useful response?

  For the ‘trust-building exercise’ Margo moved us to a different deck, one without tables or chairs. She told us that each of us in turn was going to have to navigate an obstacle course blindfolded while the rest of our team gave us directions. The obstacles were big upside-down cans inside a large chalked rectangle and they got rearranged every time a new person was blindfolded, so simply memorizing their initial positions wouldn’t work.

  We were put in two teams. I got Alec and Hien; the other team comprised Webster, Yung-Su, Chet and Ginny. Having more people, they had to start first. Webster was first up while Ginny and Chet shouted directions. They were about as accurate as you’d expect people in management and finance to be; Webster kicked all but two of the cans. Good. Wait, was I actually getting invested in this stupid game?

  Well, I like winning. And while Alec was being blindfolded and Margo Foster was rearranging the cans, I decided to add a little of the precision that the tech people really should have thought of for themselves.

  “Is there any rule that the directions have to consist of telling the blindfolded person where to step next?”

  “Not necessary,” Margo said, “what else could you say?”

  “What about telling them where the cans are? That isn’t against the rules, is it?”

  “How could we do that?” Hien asked.

  “First we establish a metric.”

  Light dawned.

  “We could use one can-diameter! And the whole space is eleven cans wide by…” Hien’s lips moved soundlessly.

  “Alec, don’t start yet!” I called. “We are going to do something different this time.”

  “By twenty-one cans deep,” Hien finished.

  We agreed on coordinates for all the cans in their current configuration.

  “But Alec won’t know what we’re doing?”

  “We’ll tell him before he starts.”

  “Then the other team will know too.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They couldn’t copy us if they tried; they’ll stay with counting steps,” Hien said confidently. “Yung-Su is the only one who’ll even understand the concept of x and y coordinates, and he won’t be able to explain it to the others.”

  “All the same… Is there a rule that we can’t talk to Alec before he starts?”

  Margo threw up her hands. “No, there isn’t. Why would there be? I’ve already told you what you have to do. Normally people just follow the directions.”

  “We’re not normal,” Hien and Alec said in unison, “we’re tech people.”

  Hien darted around the obstacle course and whispered in Alec’s ear for a moment. He whispered back.

  “I told him the course dimensions and metric,” she reported on her return, “and we’re going to give him x and y coordinates in the usual style, but we’re going to tack delta onto the x’s and epsilon onto the y’s. That was his idea. Just to foment a little more confusion on the other side.”

  I grinned. This was beginning to be fun.

  “Alec,” I called, “you can start now, and you’re clear through three delta, three epsilon.”

  Alec took three mincing steps forward; his feet were almost as big as the cans.

  “Obstacle at 3 delta, 4 epsilon,” Hien called, and Alec took a small step sideways.

  “Next obstacle at 4 delta, 6 epsilon,” I called.

  That, of course, was no obstacle from Alec’s present position; he just had to be sure not to veer to his right with the next three short steps.

  We took turns calling out the coordinates. Alec made it through unscathed and we cheered as he pulled off the blindfold. Margo’s lips were pursed, but she didn’t say anything.

  For a grand finale Alec and Hien called directions to me alternating the sequence of coordinates. When Alec called a location of “5 delta, 7 epsilon” it translated to 5x, 7y. But when Hien called “12 delta, 9 epsilon” that meant a location at 9x, 12y. There really wasn’t any point to that bit of mental gymnastics, except to make it more interesting for me; the non-tech team was already totally lost. But it all worked out well. Even though we had a handicap of plus three to make up for only having three players, we finished with a score of five to thirteen.

  “I don’t
know how good that was for team building,” Margo said, “but I certainly have to give you credit for innovative problem solving. Now, we’re a little behind schedule thanks to some people taking long pauses between contestants, so let’s move right along to the next exercise.”

  Oh, help. I’d been so involved in the obstacle game that I’d forgotten to think out my three statements. I’d have to wing it.

  Once the cans were neatly stacked against a wall, Margo had us all line up in front of them. She explained that she would call one person at a time to stand in front and deliver their three statements. “Remember,” she said, “you can use body language as well as your knowledge of your teammate to guide your decisions. Sally, why don’t you begin?”

  Silence.

  “Come on,” Ginny said to me after a moment when nobody moved, “don’t be scared, we don’t bite.”

  Oh, right. I was Sally. Oops. I stepped forward and turned around to face them – and prayed for inspiration. “Uh, I’m engaged to Shani.” I’m not as bad a liar as my colleagues claim; I managed to say that without touching my cheek. I stared past the bright young staffers and tried to think of something else to say. Preferably including a lie so obvious that it would carry them right past the possibility that I’d already lied to them just now. “And, ah, I’m five feet three inches tall and… and I love tuna salad.”

  They conferred for a moment. Webster was loudly in favor of the first statement as a lie, but the rest of them squashed the suggestion. “I know,” Hien said. “We can test the second one right now.” She darted forward and stood eye to eye with me. “I am five feet two inches tall,” she announced, “and unless you’re counting her hair, so is Sally.”

  “You’re wrecking my self-image,” I complained.

  But five of the six – Webster loudly abstained- decided that 5’3” was the lie. “Sneaky of you to put it so close to your actual height,” Ginny said, “if it weren’t for Hien we’d probably have accepted that one.”

  Dear, darling little Hien, whom I suddenly liked a lot less than earlier. I bet she was at least five feet two and a half, anyway.