The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  She still hadn’t moved. Even when he delivered the fresh mug to her desk, setting it down exactly on the sticky ring left by the previous brew.

  “Pif? Are you catatonic again?”

  One eye twitched.

  She got like this sometimes, caught up in a recursive math loop that rendered her higher functions incapable of voluntary action. Petrovitch waved his hand in front of her face; her eye twitched faster.

  “Yeah, okay. A drop of the hard stuff should sort you out.” He went behind her desk and opened the drawer that contained the bottle of lemon juice. He spilled some into the palm of his hand and brought it close to her nose.

  She blinked, made a face, and recoiled.

  “Sam,” she said. “How long?”

  “No idea. I just got in.”

  She stretched extravagantly, and Petrovitch disposed of the juice the same way he’d gotten rid of the coffee dregs. She gave a cry of pain.

  “You okay?”

  “Pins and needles. I’ll be fine in a minute. Ow ow ow.”

  “How you don’t get pressure sores is a miracle.” He wiped his hand on a suitable leaf and used a wet wipe to clear the stickiness away.

  “My neck hurts too.”

  “You’re not safe to be left on your own.” He pulled out two cellophane-wrapped pastries from his bag. “They’re a bit squashed, but they’re fresh. Ish. At least, I only just bought them.”

  “Give me a minute to boot up.” She dug her knuckles into her left thigh and grimaced. “What’s the time?”

  “Half eleven.” She clearly expected him to carry on. “On the Tuesday.”

  “Good. I thought I’d wasted a whole day.” Pif tried to stand, using her desk for leverage. She wobbled like Bambi, then managed a semblance of upright. “I have good news and bad news.”

  Petrovitch passed her a pastry. “Good news, please. My life is so irredeemably pizdets that I can’t cope with anything bad.”

  “We haven’t got any competition. I may have been as subtle as a brick casing out the opposition, but we’re in front.”

  “Stanford?”

  “Out of sight.” She took a few tentative steps and didn’t find them too painful. “Are you sure you don’t want the bad news? I mean, after yesterday, how could it get worse?”

  “Well, I was woken up this morning by a desperate American trying to get me to gang up on some very serious Japanese criminals. After breakfast I got picked up by the organitskaya and threatened with not one, but two guns. Then I got kissed by the daughter of the Japanese crime boss right in front of all her bodyguards. To be fair, I haven’t died today, but it’s not even lunchtime yet.”

  “I can’t get from the quantum to the classical,” she said.

  The gears in Petrovich’s mind spun up to speed. “It didn’t bother Maxwell.”

  “Maxwell was a genius standing on the shoulders of other genii. He made a priori assumptions that happened to turn out to be right.”

  “He didn’t predict wave-particle duality, or quantum effects.”

  “But we can’t ignore them. Can we?” A note of doubt crept into Pif’s voice.

  “Yeah. We can. Look at the gravitomagnetic equations. They do just that. And frame dragging works.”

  “But… what about chromodynamics?”

  Petrovitch reached forward and took one of the sheets of paper from her desk. “You’re doing this ass-backward. You’re trying to mash the electrostrong into gravity and it just won’t work. Well, it might, but remember: it’s supposed to be beautiful, not ugly. This,” he said, shaking the paper, “is ugly. I never liked it. It’s inelegant. What you cooked up yesterday is poetry.”

  “If I can’t prove it, it means nothing.” She ripped at the pastry with her teeth, spitting out the cellophane and chewing on what was left.

  “Start at the beginning. Ignore everything else. Gravity might not even be part of a theory of everything.”

  “It is,” she said, spraying crumbs. “I feel it in my soul.”

  “So did Einstein and he took two decades at the end of his life to get precisely nowhere.”

  “You said it was poetry.” Pif looked at him reproachfully.

  “Ass-backward poetry.” Petrovitch stood in front of the whiteboard with his coffee.

  Pif started to say something, and he held up his hand.

  She waited and chewed and drank.

  “Can you,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper, “derive all the other forces from this equation? If we expand this to be multi-dimensional,” and he swallowed, “we can find out just how many dimensions reality has.”

  She looked, and rubbed her eyes. “I… don’t know. I’m too tired to think straight anymore.”

  Petrovitch shook his head. “Look, this is your baby. And your math is way better than mine. Go and get your head down: this will still be here when you get back.”

  She groaned. “I don’t want to leave it. We’re so close.”

  “It’ll be fine. I don’t want to come in here tomorrow and have to pry the finished proof out of your cold, dead hand. I’ll try and do some of the easy stuff—if I can manage that. That still leaves the really hard sums and most of the credit for you.”

  “Don’t break the symmetry,” she warned.

  “I thought I was supposed to.”

  “Try without.”

  “I’ll try with, then try without. And I’m going to use some real data, whether you like it or not.”

  “Experimentalists. Have I told you how much I hate them?”

  “Only about a thousand times.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Science: it works.”

  Pif drank her coffee, and summoned enough strength to pick up her rucksack. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Go,” he said. “See you in the morning. You can go through my shabby math while I cringe pathetically in a corner, then I can watch you reimagine the whole universe.”

  She slung the rucksack over her shoulder. “If you put it like that, I don’t see how I can argue.”

  “I might even get some of my own work done. You never know.”

  “Boys and their toys,” she said, edging toward the door. “Sam, are you…?”

  “Go away. There won’t be any sleep for a week if you crack this.”

  She bowed her head, her beaded hair falling forward like a curtain. “Sam?”

  “What?”

  “I’m glad I’m sharing a room with you. You get me.”

  “You mean you’re as dysfunctional as I am, just in different ways? Yeah, that’s about right. Now, in the name of whatever god you believe in, go.”

  She nodded. She was halfway out into the corridor when she stopped. “What?” she said with typical directness.

  “Police,” said a familiar voice.

  “Chyort voz’mi!” He launched himself into his chair and folded his arms.

  Pif put her head back around the door. “Sam? There’s a policeman here.”

  “I know. Send him in, then go home. I’ll be fine.” He pushed his glasses up his face. “He’s not staying for longer than he absolutely needs to. Which is about a minute, if he’s lucky.”

  Chain wandered in, blinking. “Petrovitch.”

  “Detective Inspector Chain. Found my rat yet?”

  “Ongoing inquiries,” he said. He glanced down at Pif’s desk and reached out to pick up one of her equations.

  Petrovitch leaped up and slapped his hand down on top of the paper. “Touch nothing. Really.”

  Chain held his hands up. “It didn’t look like it was going to break, but if you insist.” He looked around. “I was expecting big machines that sparked and hummed.”

  “We keep those in the basement next to the reanimated bodies. What do you want?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. How about five hundred thousand euros?”

  “Back of the queue, Inspector. I have to be dead before you collect.”

  “You think you’re smart?”

  “I think I now stand a better chance of
staying alive than I would relying on you. And thanks ever so much for sending Sorenson around. Not only did it get us both picked up by Marchenkho, I then had to get farmboy back to Oshicora before he realized his pet coder had gone awol.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Chain. He opened a filing cabinet drawer and peered inside. “Interesting character, Sorenson. Did he give you his war hero spiel?”

  “He might have mentioned something; it didn’t get him very far. Why?”

  “That sort of stuff goes down really well in America, gets the folks onside. He tried it on me, so I thought I’d try and find out what he actually did for Uncle Sam.” He rolled the drawer shut. “It’s not pleasant reading. His civilian file is pretty thick, too. Not like your records—what little there is seems to fit together very neatly.”

  “The truth has a habit of doing that.”

  “So does something manufactured. You see, I can’t find any trace of a Samuil Petrovitch, aged twenty-two from St. Petersburg at all. Which could mean one of two things.”

  Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his nose. “No, don’t tell me. I like games. I’m an Armageddonist with a suitcase bomb and head full of righteous fury, biding my time for, what, six years now before I set my nuke and kill you all. Or alternatively, Russian record keeping isn’t what its supposed to be. Your choice, I suppose.”

  “Something’s not right, Petrovitch. I don’t like that. It makes me nervous, and when I get nervous, I get curious. Like a dog with a bone.”

  “Your metaphors are all mixed, Inspector. You’d better watch out for that.” Petrovitch flexed his fingers, making his thumbs crack. “If that’s all, don’t let the door hit your zhopu on the way out.”

  Chain harrumphed, then wandered to the door. He reamed at his eye, and coughed hard. When he was done, he leaned on the handle and turned back to Petrovitch.

  “Is she a good kisser?”

  “Ahueyet? You’ve been following me!” Petrovitch stood up and went nose to nose with the detective. “No. You followed Sorenson. No, that’s not all of it, either. You bugged Sorenson so you could follow him.”

  “Calm down, Petrovitch.” Chain put his hands up between them.

  “Do you know what Oshicora will do if they find a police tag on him?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “They’ll kill him.” Petrovitch was breathing hard.

  “Careful of your heart. But of course, you’re getting a new one, so it won’t matter soon.” Chain stepped out of the way of the opening door. “I could deport Sorenson right now, but I’m increasingly interested in this VirtualJapan he’s working on. I’d lose all that.”

  “And you wonder why people hate the police.”

  “No,” said Chain, “I’m up to speed on that, too. Go carefully, Petrovitch.”

  13

  Petrovitch only had half his mind on his tensors. The other half was gnawing furiously at an entirely different problem.

  After ten minutes, he gave up, threw his pen down in disgust and dug around in his jacket pocket. Sorenson’s card was white and shiny, with a little animated logo spinning around in one corner. It had the company phone number embossed across the front, along with the URL: the back was over-printed with Sorenson’s name and mobile number.

  He tapped the card on the desk, considered putting it back, considered throwing it in the bin, considered trying to tear at its hard plastic edges until it broke. He tossed it to one side and looked at the equation he’d started.

  “Raspizdyai kolhoznii,” he muttered. The card stared back at him.

  But he couldn’t concentrate.

  He wrenched open a drawer and unrolled a keyboard. His screen was under a pile of books he hadn’t quite got around to returning to the stacks: he dragged it out and propped it against the fading spines. Some of the pixels had failed due to the weight of paper, but he could see around them.

  He tapped the rubbery keys to make sure he had a connection, then logged on to his own computer.

  There was a touch pad somewhere. He moved some monographs, and it was hiding underneath. He nudged it closer to the keyboard and got the two talking.

  If he’d had his rat, the whole operation would have been simplicity itself, but he hadn’t bought it to make his life easy. He’d bought it for his insurance policy, the one he’d have to cash in if his world came tumbling down around him.

  He contemplated his need for his missing hardware while listening to the ringing of Sorenson’s phone.

  “Sorenson.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Sorenson, and listen to me. Don’t say my name. Are you alone?”

  There was a pause. “Yes. He’s just left.”

  “Right. There is a very good chance that you’re still wearing a bug that Chain planted on you. I know you changed your clothes this morning, and I don’t know if that makes a difference, but I wouldn’t risk it.”

  The silence that followed was long enough that Petrovitch pinged Sorenson’s phone to make sure it was still on.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Chain’s just been to see me and casually let slip that he’s been listening to our conversation all morning.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I’m not your agony aunt, Sorenson. I’ve done the right thing, and now I’m hanging up. Oh, and I might not care about whatever horrible things you’ve done in the past, but both Oshicora and Chain seem to know all about them. Goodbye.”

  He closed the connection and deleted the phone from his records, then cleared all the computer components away. He was reasonably confident that the phone call was untraceable and anonymous. Confident, but not certain.

  He shook his head. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. He picked up his pen again and adjusted his glasses, allowing his concentration to blot out all external distractions.

  His pen hovered over the paper, and then started to write. Symbols and letters spilled out, each line getting progressively longer than the one before. Then, with a blink and a pair of raised eyebrows, he started whittling away at the expressions, reducing pairs of them to simpler equations or single values.

  He’d almost finished, and he felt a rush of cold heat inside. Something was falling out of the mass of complex mathematics, something that he didn’t recognize but which carried the elegance and beauty of true meaning.

  He stared at the final line. Now that he was done, he felt growing doubt. Pif would look at it and laugh, then show him where he’d gone wrong. It wasn’t that he was terrible at math, just that he wasn’t as good as she was. She only had to look at an equation to taste its use and quality.

  Petrovitch started to work backward, trying to justify each step to himself, testing each part for error, when he was interrupted by a polite knock at the door.

  No one ever knocked. No one he knew was emotionally or socially equipped to knock and wait. Doors were to be shoulder-charged and burst through.

  He set down his pen and cleared his throat. “Come in?”

  It was Hijo who stepped in first. “Petrovitch-san? Is this a convenient time?”

  Petrovitch felt the sudden drop in his blood pressure, and its equally sudden surge as his defibrillator compensated. His hands shook and he clamped them flat on his desk to stop their telltale movement.

  “Petrovitch-san?” asked Hijo again.

  “Convenient for what, precisely?”

  “Mister Oshicora would like to talk to you about a matter of some delicacy.”

  Petrovitch had no idea what he meant. It didn’t sound good but not only did he have nowhere to run to, he had no way of running. In his current state, he’d get halfway down the corridor before keeling over clutching at his chest.

  “I suppose now’s as good a time as any.”

  Hijo looked around the room, and took in the closed blinds, the pre-Armageddon paint, the unpleasantly sticky lino, the vague, haphazard attempts to humanize the workspace. He no
dded and stepped back outside.

  Petrovitch peeled his sweaty palms off the desk top and started to stand. Oshicora came in and closed the door. He smiled and gave his little bow.

  “Vsyo govno, krome mochee,” said Petrovitch to himself, closing his eyes.

  “Pardon, Petrovitch-san?”

  “It’s an old Russian saying, nothing to worry about.” He decided to put a brave face on the situation. It might be his last few minutes on the planet, but he was determined to go out with his middle finger firmly extended in salute. “We’re not exactly set up for visitors here, but you can have my chair.”

  “Your colleague, Doctor Ekanobi, is not here?”

  “No. She went—I sent her—home. She was working all night and I thought it best.”

  “I will sit at her desk, if you have no objections.” Oshicora moved the wheeled chair aside and sat on the very front of it. His attention was drawn, like Chain’s before him, to the handwritten equations. He lifted the top sheet up and examined it carefully. “It seems strange, anachronistic even,” he said, “that in this modern world there is still a place for pen, ink and paper.”

  “Computers can only do so much,” said Petrovitch. “They can still only do what we tell them to do.”

  “So very true,” mused Oshicora. He put the piece of paper down on the pile, exactly where he’d found it. “Your work progresses well?”

  Petrovitch looked down at his own desk, at the lines of script that had fallen from his nib. “This isn’t my work. I’m just helping out.”

  “You are a very talented man,” said Oshicora. “Which is rare enough. You are also compassionate. The two qualities combine to make you an attractive prospect to a certain young woman of our mutual acquaintance.”

  It wasn’t about tipping Sorenson off. It was about Sonja. Petrovitch’s sense of relief was like being picked up by an ocean wave: cold, clear, irresistible. He even laughed.

  “I have no feelings one way or another toward your daughter, Oshicora-san, romantic or otherwise.”

  “She kissed you,” he said.

  “She caught me off-guard. I didn’t know she was going to do that until she did it.”