Savant

by Nik Abnett

  Chapter Four

  TOBE DIDN’T SEE his Students for their tutorials the day after he had taken up his interest in probability. The day after that was a rest day, and no tutorials were Scheduled. It was not difficult for Metoo to switch the Schedule out so that rest days were irregular, and Tobe would not lose any work-time. The Students’ hours would be made up in short order, and everything would return to normal.

  PITU 3 WOKE up, hit his button, and checked his Schedule. Metoo had cancelled tutorials. Pitu had hoped to finish his sock project, and deliver the results with aplomb during his tutorial, which had been Scheduled for the afternoon session: plenty of time. He had just been given an extra day.

  Pitu stood on the hard, cracked linopro of his room, his feet naked, his hands wrapped around a very mediocre bowl of oatpro; the grittiness had been swapped for a watery texture and a faintly soapy taste. He didn’t notice either after the first couple of spoonfuls. The spoon sat in the half-empty bowl, untouched for several minutes as the contents cooled quickly, and began to congeal.

  Pitu stared at the wipe-wall. Not only had he intended getting the maths and physics of the sock problem down, he had actually managed to do it quickly and without apparent errors. It never crossed his mind to wonder why.

  He hit the compress button on the wall, and several neat pages of mathematical workings emerged from the mini-print slot. The work was both immaculate and correct. He hoped that the solution was elegant, but could not be sure.

  Pitu 3 had accomplished his task, and had twenty-four hours to catch up with the other Students, and get a little further forward with the theoretical problems that tended to stretch his thinking past its natural elastic limit. He put the bowl of cold oatpro on the chair, the spoon sticking out of it at an unlikely angle created by the congealed breakfast food, and took the rag off its hook on the wipe-wall. It would take him an hour to reinstate the hard-learned formulae on the left of the wall before he could even begin to add to his learning, or at least make the attempt.

  METOO PLACED THE dish of perfectly cooked eggpro in front of Tobe, and excused herself. She turned her back on him, and walked the short distance to the only closed door in the flat. Tobe liked to be able to see the space around him when he was not working. When he was in his office, he was content with his four walls and all the ideas they contained; at home, he liked to know what was beyond every threshold. He never entered Metoo’s room, and her door was never much more than barely ajar, but he didn’t like the door to be closed, and, beyond the door, he didn’t like the room to be in darkness. It was as though it might contain something predatory.

  As it was, he was a little afraid of other people. He disliked their private domains: the places that he had no reference for, and didn’t understand, with their odd smells and strange, unnecessary objects, arranged without purpose, or thought to symmetry. When Metoo knew she would be spending time with Tobe, she left all the doors wide open, and Tobe’s door was kept permanently open with a little wooden wedge, carved with a stylised owl. Neither Metoo nor Tobe could remember the door in any other position, nor did either of them know where the wedge had come from; it had certainly been in situ when Metoo had joined the household.

  Metoo kept the door closed on the Companion’s room. It was a superior space to the Assistant’s room, with better climate control, a bigger floor-plan and better light. It had, originally, been intended for the Master, but he preferred the small, Spartan room at the end of the corridor, which had been designed for the lowliest member of the household: the room that Pitu 3 still believed he could earn.

  She opened the door to the Companion’s room, just far enough for her to squeeze through the gap, and closed it quickly behind her. Most of the flats had three bedrooms for their usual three inhabitants, and when it had been decided that Metoo should serve Tobe in her dual role, the third room had become vacant. She was at liberty to inhabit it, as she was acting Companion, but she requisitioned Service to use it for another purpose. Masters, once housed, were never moved, their households revolving squarely around them. There was no question of them taking up residence in one of the smaller units, so Service had allowed her request.

  Metoo’s reasoning was both sound and simple. The flat had to be heated and cooled, and she would not use any extra light, because the sun provided all that she needed through the south-facing window. The room would cost nothing to run, except for her time and hard work.

  She had grown the first plants from seeds that she had saved from requisitioned fruit, putting them in saucers filled with scraps of blotting paperpro, or old cotpro socks. She was thrilled when little plants grew, and was soon producing small amounts of fruit. Gradually, over a number of weeks and months, she requisitioned more suitable receptacles and growing mediums, switching them out with her food and clothing rations, and she soon had a very viable indoor garden.

  During her second High alone with Tobe, Service had offered Metoo the use of part of the garden area that backed onto the flats. It had been intended for vehicles, when they had been privately owned, but had been returned to a more natural state in the last century. The robust, year-round planting was a natural aid to global cooling, but their seemed no reason why Metoo should not grow some of her own food, especially when it benefitted the rest of the community, both in terms of rations, and the pretty garden she had built.

  Metoo ambled around her room, which amounted to a combination potting shed and hothouse, spraying some of the larger plants, and releasing some of the germinating seeds from beneath their swathes of wadding. Not wanting to disturb Tobe, not wanting his company for a few more minutes, Metoo opened the tall window on the south side of the room, sat on its ledge, and swung her legs out, dropping gently down onto the grass on the other side. Her garden was only metres away, and she went to inspect the levels in her precious water-butts, and look at the seedlings she had already planted.

  Tobe sat at the kitchen counter in his clean robe. His hair was still a little wet, and it dripped slightly onto his neck, leaving a spreading run of water droplets down the back of his robe. He spooned the last of the eggpro into his mouth, and looked down into the empty dish.

  “It is the same,” he said.

  METOO LOOKED UP, suddenly. She gazed across the greensward that separated her from the flat, uncomprehending, and cast a brief glance through the garden-room window.

  She caught her breath.

  Tobe stood on the other side of the window.

  Adrenalin threatened to pump panic through Metoo as she stood among her plants, and her visual acuity was increased to the point where she could see a tiny drop of water fall from a strand of Tobe’s fringe, onto his forehead.

  “It is the same,” he said.

  Tobe turned from the window, and was gone before Metoo could reach him. She gathered her robe in one hand, and thrust one naked leg in through the window, without ceremony. She closed the garden-room door behind her, took one deep breath, and walked into the kitchen.

  Tobe stood on the other side of the counter, facing her, looking down into the empty breakfast dish that sat in the space between them. His hands were flat on the counter, and Metoo watched them for a moment. They were still. He did not seem agitated. She looked at his down-turned face, but could not catch his eye. Metoo reached across the counter and took Tobe’s face gently in her hands. He looked up at her, and she smiled at him. He looked the same.

  Tobe picked up the empty breakfast dish and handed it to Metoo. Then he left the kitchen, and Metoo heard the door of the flat close behind him as he went to work in his office.

  The bowl still in her hands, Metoo walked around to the other side of the counter, and sat down on Tobe’s stool. She stared into the space where she had just been standing. She sat there for several seconds before she took another breath. Her shoulders slumped slightly as she stared into the space on the other side of the kitchen counter. There was nothing very much to see, certainly nothing new. Everything was the same as it had been si
nce she’d moved into the flat.

  She sat on the stool, the dish in her hand, for several minutes. Of course it was the same; that was the point. Tobe didn’t like change. He liked routine. He liked to know what was coming next. He liked the familiar. He obsessed about anything new that came into his life. The garden room had been running for several years, and still he had never entered it, not until today. He had never even opened the door, before. What was going on?

  Chapter Five

  SERVICE DECIDED THAT, on the third day after Tobe took up his interest in probability, the Schedule would replicate that of the first, fateful day. Anomalies had occurred during the intervening period, and there was an ebb and flow to them that might become a pattern. Strazinsky maintained the Code Green throughout that period, and all the relevant Schedules were re-set.

  PITU 3 ARRIVED for his 08:30 tutorial early, and was waiting outside Tobe’s office door when the Master arrived. Tobe did not acknowledge Pitu; he simply opened the door, and allowed his student to follow him into the room.

  Pitu stopped on the threshold to the office, watching as Tobe tiptoed across the floor, weaving his way to the centre of the room in tiny increments, as he avoided standing on chalked workings, and ragged pages of script, apparently torn out of books and stuck to the linopro. Pitu looked around the door to the wipe-wall. It was covered in maths, formulae and equations weaving across the wall, and, often, across each other. At least two different pens had been used, one of which had obviously failed halfway through an equation, which petered out before being picked up again in another colour, so that the middle of the thought faded, and then disappeared, leaving a solitary white space on the wall.

  Pitu stood on the threshold to the office for several seconds, his mouth open. This was wrong, all wrong. Pitu was thrust back into his distant past to a time when disorder meant pain, to a time when he had been too young to understand the cruelty that was meted out to him. He wanted to cry out, as he remembered, for the first time in years, the beatings, the hunger and the neglect. Then he came-to, as if out of a trance.

  He took hold of the button on the cord around his neck, and pressed, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, and not letting go.

  Chapter Six

  TOBE LEFT THE flat and made his way to his office, a wet patch still visible on the back of his robe from his dripping hair.

  He let himself into his room and set to work. His hands flew as he crossed out equations on his wipe-wall, or linked them to others. Some equations got new brackets, or were swept away altogether with the swinging of the rag he held in his left hand.

  Periodically, Tobe picked up On Probability, thumbed through it, and lighted on a page that seemed useful. He tore out the page, leaving more ink-smudged fingerprints on it, and licked the back of it, using his spit to stick the page to the wipe-wall.

  Two hours later, the office shelves were beginning to look like a crone’s toothless grin, with volumes pulled out, apparently at random, and the remaining books leaning into each other, leaving black, triangular gaps.

  An hour after that, the wipe-wall was full of cross-referenced workings-out, and brimming with formulae, old and new. Tobe stood in the middle of the room, examining his handiwork, as if he might have forgotten something.

  He had forgotten nothing.

  Tobe had a photographic memory for almost everything, but especially for mathematics, including all the work he had ever done. He could reproduce any solution to any problem that he had solved in his thirty-five years, including all the various dead-end pathways he had followed, and all the missteps he had made and erased along the way. If required, he could have reproduced any mathematical problem he had solved, with reference to the colours of pen he’d had on hand, and the ink smudges he had left behind in his haste.

  The wall was full, all the reference was in place, and, still, Tobe had no solution.

  “It was the same,” he said, looking from the wipe-wall to the tattered book in his hands, the cover barely clinging to the remaining pages, fewer than half of them left. He tossed the book onto the chair, its cover coming free as it sailed across the room. The remaining pages scattered across the floor, and the cover landed half-on, half-off the chair, its sky-blue book-cloth hanging over the edge of the seat.

  Tobe got on his hands and knees on the floor, and began to collect up the pages. He stopped, and looked at the bundle in his fist. He pulled out one of the pages and skim-read it. He licked it and stuck it to the linopro. Then he looked around for something to write with.

  THE CONTENTS OF Tobe’s room had not changed since he had taken it over, almost twenty years earlier. One or two things had been added, notably, more books, wedged tightly onto the shelves, which now extended to the full height of the room, beyond anyone’s natural reach.

  The top two shelves had been added five years earlier, and had caused a great deal of huffing and blowing on Tobe’s part. He had not been able to enter his office, alone, for several weeks. The little stepladder that he needed to retrieve the books on the top shelves had lived in the corridor outside his room for two Highs, and had finally been brought in by Metoo; it had taken all day for Tobe to decide exactly where they should live in the room. Tobe’s chair was the one he had inherited when he had taken over the room, and had, in its long life, had five replacement legs, two new seats, and a grand total of eight back-rests. The fact that it was, essentially, an entirely different chair to the one that Tobe had first used seemed lost on him.

  Tobe seldom worked at his desk, preferring to use the expanse of the wipe-wall, and then print his work off to share it, or to illustrate his intentions to his students and other mathematicians that he corresponded with around the World. The contents of the desk drawers were constant, and the bottom drawer on the left still held the old-fashioned and obsolete mechanical drawing, measuring and calculating devices that he had collected and been obsessed by as a kid. The drawer also held a box of chalk, long sticks of dusty yellow that had probably not been used anywhere in the World for at least fifty years, and possibly more than a century, and a collection of various types of antique chemical inks.

  Tobe opened the drawer, from his position kneeling on the floor, and took out the box of chalk. He turned it over several times in his hands, and then opened it. He took out the first stick of chalk, and then replaced it. He looked at the dusty residue on his forefinger and thumb, smelled it, and licked it. He took the same piece of chalk out of the box, again, and, tentatively, made a mark with it on the linopro. He looked down at the mark, and started to get off his knees to go to the wipe-wall. As he stood, he realised that he had smudged the chalk mark, not quite obliterating it, but fading it dramatically. He looked down at his robe, and saw a yellow smudge on it. He took the rag from its hook on the wipe-wall, and went back to wipe away the chalk mark. When he had finished, it was even less distinct than it had been when he’d knelt in it, but it could still be seen, as if the colour had faded from a tiny patch of the linopro.

  For the next two hours, Tobe stood, bent double at the waist, working out his mathematical problem using chalk on linopro. He worked around his feet, and then moved them carefully to bare patches of floor so that he could continue his calculations.

  AS METOO WALKED along the corridor, towards Tobe’s office, he emerged, closed the door behind him, and turned. She raised her hand in greeting, and they walked towards each other. Then she turned, took his arm, and walked with him back to the flat.

  Her relief was palpable. Metoo rarely went to his office, unless Service needed her to, or Tobe asked for her, but he seemed not to think it strange to see her there. She had not known what she would find, or what to expect. Yesterday had been disturbing in so many ways, and Tobe’s actions this morning, entering the garden-room, had done nothing to alleviate Metoo’s concerns.

  He had been gone since six o’clock this morning, starting work at least a couple of hours before his usual time, so she was relieved to see him leaving his office at hi
s regular lunch hour.

  Chapter Seven

  THE OPERATOR HAD been out for the rest of the previous day, being de-briefed. He could tell Service nothing that they didn’t already know. He had followed Protocol, and could answer for every decision. In fact, he had not made any decisions; he had simply done what was required of him. There would be no reprimand, or demotion, but neither had he done anything of note; he would not be hailed a hero. He would return to his Workstation at Service as soon as Code Blue was re-established, and maintained for a specified period, which had not yet been decided, but which would, undoubtedly, mirror the length of time that the station was in Code Green. His stand-down could be of any duration, but he did not expect it to be longer than a few days, at most, and he looked forward to the respite. No Operator was ever assigned to an alternate Workstation: one Operator, one screen, one Station.

  Strazinsky, on the other hand, had a very full timetable. As the Named Operator coming into a crisis situation, with a Code change, he was required to see out the change. However long it took, Strazinsky must remain on-Station throughout the crisis, until all settings were restored and verified, or until the situation hit critical mass for a change of Code-status to Yellow. He had expected a long night. What he did not expect was ever to be relieved of his post because of a Code ramp-up.

  IN THE TWO centuries that Service had been global, two extraordinary events had occurred, including the famous failure of one of the Colleges.

  On that occasion, Code Red had been reached in less than thirty minutes, and had seen four changes of Operator, from Blue to Green and then on, in turn, to Yellow, Orange, and finally Red. The staff change-overs had not happened fast enough, and there had been a massive loss of life at the American College in the Old Mid-West. The College had not survived. More than decimated, it had lost almost three in four of its inhabitants. Death fell democratically across all ages and grades: a thousand Students, Seniors and Assistants died, along with more than a hundred Masters and Companions. Two Actives had also perished.