A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “Come on, guys,” I burst out as soon as only the other research fellows were left in the break room. Well, them and Lensky, who was leaning on the wall and not contributing anything. “What were you not saying in front of the priest guy?”

  “It was more what we weren’t saying in front of Prakash,” Ingrid said.

  I stared. “He’s kind of a jerk, but surely you don’t think he’s gone over to the dark side?”

  “No, but remember how he froze yesterday when you were in trouble?”

  “I didn’t actually see it. Being otherwise occupied at the time.”

  “Well – it was bad. I think he’d be more of a liability than an asset on this next job.”

  “Which is?”

  Ben took the lead. “We may have seen the weapon.”

  “It was hanging right there on the wall,” Ingrid mourned, “and I wrote it off as a piece of kitsch for tourists!”

  They described it to me and it certainly sounded like what the pandit had been talking about. Trident. Made of iron, Shani’s metal. Studded with what they’d taken for blue glass, but probably were actual sapphires. And definitely kept close to Shani himself.

  “So all we need to do,” Colton summed up glumly, “is to get into Shani’s apartment in the SCI building, which is now permanently shielded against us, and get out again with the trident.”

  “We’ll think of something,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

  For the first time in this meeting, Lensky dropped his imitation of a statue leaning against a wall.

  “That,” he said, “is what I’m afraid of. You – all four of you – have a track record of overlooking little problems like the chances of injury and death when you ‘think of something.’ I want you to promise that you’ll consult with me before launching into some dangerously hairbrained scheme.”

  “Does that mean,” I asked, “we can go ahead without consultation if our scheme isn’t dangerously hairbrained?”

  His reaction to that bright idea was, literally, unprintable.

  15. The experience of being a fish

  Austin, Friday

  Eventually we went back to our separate offices on the far side of the wall. Brainstorming about how to get into SCI hadn’t produced any good ideas; maybe we’d do better if we reverted to our normal style, sitting alone and sketching constructs that might do what we wanted.

  At last, that’s what Colton, Ingrid and I were doing. As we were to discover, Ben was taking his powerful but impractical brain in a somewhat different direction.

  “Mr. M.,” I said, “do you have any idea how to break a permanent shield?”

  “Certainly. It is not a complicated task. As I have already explained to you, all that is needed is for someone to enter the space that is being shielded and remove the mage tokens on the perimeter of the shield. If I wished to remove the protection over these offices, for instance, I would erase the diagrams and axioms written on the outer walls. In the case of the Master of Ravens, I suspect the shield is maintained with the aid of grackle feathers, so you would look for those first.”

  Okay, his answers were consistent if unhelpful: he’d told us the same thing in the restroom. Somebody would have to get into the building and wander around unquestioned. Great! If we’d been able to do that, we could have just taken the trident without even bothering about Chayyaputra’s shield.

  That brought another question to mind.

  “If someone is physically inside another mage’s area, I mean a space that he had shielded against them, can they teleport to a place outside the shield?”

  Mr. M. hummed for a while and clicked his scales softly. “I cannot answer that,” he said at last. “Much depends on the way in which the shield was constructed. In the case of these offices, yes, a miscreant who had gained entry by non-magical means could then teleport himself away; the permanent shield you are using is simply an extension of the algorithm for your personal shields, which were designed to prevent attack from outside. The only way to discover whether Shani’s magic works in the same way is to test it.”

  So, unless we could do something to disable his shield over the building, someone would not only have to sneak in and steal the trident, they might have to get away without teleporting. Great.

  I wandered out to the public side to see if Annelise had happened to replenish the doughnut supply. She hadn’t. I wanted to gripe about that, but in an excess of tact I merely complained to her that I couldn’t think of any way to get into the SCI building unchallenged.

  “Ben will think of something,” she said with the serene faith of someone who isn’t expected to solve the problem herself, and went back to her crossword puzzle. I understand some people find them soothing.

  “Thalia, where are you? I’ve thought of something!” Ben called from his office on the other side of the wall.

  Annelise and I looked at each other and sputtered.

  “The man does have a sense of timing,” I allowed.

  I started to Möbius myself back to the private side, but I bumped into Ben coming the other way and we both came out into the public room. “This is good,” he said cheerfully, “I can show you and Annelise at the same time.” He glanced at some symbols jotted on his shirt cuff.

  “I wish you wouldn’t write on your good shirts,” Annelise said plaintively. She’d invested time and effort in teaching him to order the tailored Italian shirts that actually fit his lanky build; it must have been painful to see him attacking the cuffs with a ball-point pen. However, I felt the two of them could work on that problem in their personal time.

  “If you’ve figured out how to get through Shani’s shields,” I said, “let’s get Ingrid and Colton, and you can tell us all at the same time.”

  “Oh, that’s not it,” Ben said. “This is much more interesting. If it works.”

  “Ah, what happens if it doesn’t work?” Ben’s topological ideas were always interesting but sometimes also catastrophic. Witness the time he set fire to Allandale House while trying to create light. “Like starting fires with Riemann surfaces,” I reminded him. “Or sealing yourself in an impenetrable shield that blocked every way of communicating with you from outside. Or—”

  Ben pushed his shock of light brown hair out of his eyes so that I could get the full benefit of his wounded-doe expression. “Riemann fire has turned out to be quite useful,” he defended himself. “And the silly-putty shield was just a stage in development on the way to making useful shields. Anyway, I’ve completely thought this one through. Theoretically it’s perfectly sound. I just haven’t actually done it yet, and I thought you’d appreciate the fact that I’m collecting witnesses before I demonstrate it.”

  I threw my hands up. “Demonstrate at will. Just don’t take too long, okay? Some of us are trying to solve real problems here!” And making zero progress, which is probably why I was so irritable with him.

  Ben took off his glasses and carefully placed them on Annelise’s desk. “Don’t want to break them,” he said, as though that was a complete explanation. Or any kind of explanation at all, come to think of it.

  His eyes went vague and his lips started moving. I couldn’t hear what he was saying so softly; everybody who worked at the Center had a desk fan to complement the ineffective, retro-fitted air conditioning, and on a day like this the hum of the combined fans drowned out quiet conversation. I wondered what he was visualizing, and whether it would be useful, decorative, or disastrous.

  Then a curtain of fire roared up between us, startling me into taking several steps back.

  The fire alarms went off and completely drowned out Annelise, whose lips were moving now.

  The automatic sprinklers started shooting out jets of water. One of them squirted directly into my right eye. When I dodged, a second one tried to soak my hair.

  And Colton came barreling through the wall with a green-painted cylinder labeled, “This is Not a Fire Extinguisher.” (The trustees feel that the chemicals in fire extinguisher
s would be harmful to the fabric of the building. Since we feel that a conflagration would be even more harmful, Colton honored their restriction in his own way.)

  He put out the fire with one long swooping spray from the non-fire-extinguisher. The alarms stopped and the sprinkler system turned itself off. Everything was okay again, with the minor exceptions that we were all slightly damp and that Ben had disappeared.

  I couldn’t even make out the slight blur that gave away use of our camouflage algorithm to people who knew what to look for.

  His clothes were crumpled on the floor, and they seemed to be twitching slightly; but whatever was under them wasn’t nearly large enough to be Ben. With a sense of foreboding I picked up his discarded shirt. Maybe the jottings on his shirt cuff would give us a clue—oh, no. No. We weren’t going to have time to work this out mathematically; there was a fish flopping under the shirt.

  How long could it live out of water? Did Ben have the sense to transform himself back into an air-breathing form immediately?

  It didn’t seem so.

  “Thalia! Fill the sink in the bathroom!” Annelise grabbed the fish and I ran to follow her instructions.

  The sink was only a little over halfway full when she came in with her hands full of writhing fish, but after she put it into the sink the water rose almost to the top. The fish stopped struggling and I could see something moving rhythmically along its side; fins or gills or something like that. Ben would know… oh. Right. We couldn’t exactly ask him now, could we? And this fish didn’t have a tag that we could remove, so how were we going to turn Ben back into himself? I scowled at the bulgy-eyed, scaled critter in the sink. “You’d better remember how to reverse the transformation, or I’ll tell Dr. Verrick what you’ve been up to.”

  Dr. Verrick had been first our topology professor, and then our director after he created the Center for Applied Topology as a refuge for those few of his students who had a talent for making topological theorems do things they were never designed for. We learned later that he too had that talent, and had lived through some long and lonely years thinking that he was the only mathematician who was, as he put it, cursed with the supernatural. The discovery of four more applied topologists in his own classrooms had given him a new lease on life.

  He wasn’t very active these days; he wasn’t as young as he used to be, and the last year’s alarums and excursions had taken a lot out of him. But his tongue was as sharp as ever, and yes, being stuck in fish form probably wasn’t nearly as frightening to Ben as the prospect of a formal reprimand from the Director. Of the two options, I know that I’d take the involuntary-swimming one every time.

  I shivered. The bathroom seemed to be getting actually cold, which was way beyond the capabilities of our retrofitted air conditioning system. There was even a film of ice around the edge of the sink… and…

  The fish seemed to be getting bigger.

  And pinker.

  Water spilled over the edge and froze as icicles, framing the sink with a delicate frieze of ice for just a moment; then the sink pulled out of the wall under Ben’s weight and he skidded over the edge himself. He had, quite obviously, brought nothing with him. But I should have anticipated that, seeing he’d left that little pile of garments on the floor outside the bathroom.

  I averted my eyes. “I’ll, um, I’ll just get your clothes.”

  It appeared that the entire staff of the Center had gathered in the central room while Annelise and I were dunking the fish. With Lensky front and center. They started questioning me before I’d even picked up all of Ben’s discarded clothing.

  “What the (triple-barreled obscenity) just happened?” demanded Meadow.

  “What burned?” Ingrid asked.

  “What kind of fire was that?” Colton asked, “Look, the floor isn’t even scorched. So what did it burn?”

  I made a sloppy stack out of Ben’s clothes. “It was Ben’s idea,” I said, “I’ll let him tell you all about it.”

  “Where is Ben?”

  I jerked my head towards the bathroom.

  Lensky hadn’t joined the chorus of questioners. He just stood there with his arms folded and one foot tapping in a style that I, personally, found ominous. Now he said, very calmly, “Ben is in the bathroom?”

  “Yes, and I need to get these to him. He’s cold and wet.”

  “The whole office is cold,” Jimmy said. “Did he figure out how to fix our air conditioning with topology?”

  “Ah, not exactly.”

  “Your friend Ben is in the bathroom,” Lensky repeated. “You were with him. And his clothes are out here?” Lensky’s always had kind of a thing about Ben and me, though I’d thought he was getting over it. Right now he did not seem to be completely cured of that particular bit of paranoia.

  “Annelise is in there too,” I said quickly before anybody else could take a prurient interest in these little details. I opened the bathroom door a crack and shoved Ben’s clothes into Annelise’s waiting hands.

  “I’m not sure whether that makes it better or worse,” Lensky said after I abandoned Ben to figure out for himself how to get dressed in a closet-sized room full of plumbing fixtures. “Would you object to my asking Ben to restrain his amorous impulses in the office?”

  I rolled my eyes. He knew perfectly well we hadn’t been staging an orgy in the tiny third-floor bathroom. “Don’t be stupid. I don’t think it would be physically possible to have a threesome in there.”

  Jimmy, Colton, and Will all got the same distant expression, as if they were trying to picture the possibilities.

  “You two are too tall,” Will said to Jimmy and Colton.

  “You’re probably not flexible enough,” Colton told him.

  “Thalia’s small and flexible.”

  “Harper does yoga. If she came back…”

  “We could run some tests…”

  “We could not,” I snapped. “That’s not the kind of research we do here.” I turned to Lensky. “And FYI, it’s Ben’s experimental impulses that need restraining.”

  Ben finally came out of the bathroom, Annelise behind him. His clothes looked even more disheveled than usual, and he was dripping on the floor.

  “I can hardly wait to hear what concatenation of circumstances led to your becoming both wet and inadequately dressed – again,” Lensky said to him.

  To be fair, I’d thought about that when we were in Mayfield Park. And this episode made three times in less than a year. I could hardly blame Lensky for wondering if there was more than coincidence involved. For a perfect gentleman who had never, ever hit on a girl who wasn’t already interested in him, Ben did seem to have a lot of trouble keeping his pants on.

  Ben blinked at him myopically. “Where are my glasses?”

  Annelise picked them up from her desk and handed them to him. He slipped them on and blinked at us again through the smeared lenses. “Ah, that’s better. I can’t think when I can’t see.”

  “Does that mean that if I ask Lensky to take charge of your glasses, you won’t get yourself into trouble again?”

  Ben ignored me in a way that implied he was above responding to my childish taunts. “It’s because I’ve been a fish quite recently, I think,” he began.

  “Yes! Two minutes ago! What were you thinking?” Annelise’s cheeks were pink.

  Ben waved a placating hand (fin?) in her direction. “Not that. I mean the first time. Chayyaputra actually did me a big favor, giving me the experience of being a fish. It was just a matter of defining a function that would map me onto a fish, and I felt sure that could be done topologically. And it worked! See, I defined a continuous mapping with an energy-shedding property to account for the difference in mass, and I made sure it was reversible before I applied it. I just, just had a little trouble remembering the reverse mapping when I couldn’t breathe.”

  Colton grumbled, although quietly, that Ben’s turning himself into a fish didn’t do anything to solve our current problem. “It might,” Ben said. “You
know how the fire came out of nowhere when I transformed? I’ve just had another idea…”

  Ingrid, Colton and I simultaneously told him not to have any more ideas, we’d already had enough crises for one day. “What we want now,” Ingrid said, “is a nice quiet session with you and a whiteboard, to see exactly how you did this.”

  “I’m not sure you will be able to replicate it,” Ben warned. “I’m the only one here who really knows how it feels to be a fish.”

  “Just show us the mathematics,” Ingrid said.

  “I knew this girl in high school who was remarkably like a fish,” Colton said. “A cold one.”

  All right, it was a bit of a distraction from the problem of stealing the god’s trident. But I was as eager as the others to find out the topological basis of shapeshifting, and I rationalized that sometimes it was good to take a little break from an apparently intractable problem. Perhaps my subconscious would come up with a solution to the trident problem if I pretended to be thinking of something else.

  Sadly, a nice quiet afternoon with Ben and a whiteboard was not in my immediate future. He claimed he had to talk to Lensky about something first, and while we were waiting for him Mom called. Had I forgotten that we were to meet at Beth’s Bridal Salon for me to try on wedding dresses? Well yes, I had. My life had been rather full recently. What with posing as a god’s fiancée, rescuing Ben from his first sojourn as a fish, fighting with Lensky, and rescuing Ben from his second sojourn as a fish, I felt I could be excused for forgetting minor details.

  Mom, of course, did not consider the Wedding Dress Selection Trip a minor detail. For her it was probably one of the high points of the pre-wedding: looking at her daughter in a series of sumptuous gowns.

  I don’t do sumptuous, you know? I’m too short, and not exactly graceful. T-shirts and cutoffs are more my style.