An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “They can take care of themselves!” He was crashing down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  When we got outside the first thing I saw was Lensky, yelling at a hulking campus cop who was blocking his way back into the building. Colton set me on my feet and I sagged in relief before heading over to the spook. “Hey!”

  He looked at me and stopped yelling. “Okay, if she’s here, all our people are out. I don’t know about the librarians on 1 and 2.”

  “Dr. Verrick?”

  “In his other office.”

  That would be in the math building, some distance away. I relaxed and began to take in my surroundings.

  For a hot, sticky October afternoon, we had an unbelievable lot of people milling around in front of Allandale House. Why weren’t most of them in their nice air-conditioned classrooms?

  A cloud of black wings momentarily obscured my vision, and I ducked instinctively. “Oh, hell. That’s all we need. Grackles.”

  “You say that as if they were as big a problem as fires and riots,” Colton observed.

  “They can be. Remind me to tell you about last May some time.” The raucous black birds were back in the trees now, and I could see better.

  On my second look, I saw that there were several distinct groups. The Center staff and several librarians were clustered a few feet from Allandale House, between the larger crowd and the firefighters who were cautiously entering a rather damp building. The larger crowd was… peculiar.

  And noisy. Now that the alarms had been shut off – and the grackles had shut up - I could hear that they were chanting, “No Nazis, no KKK, no fascist USA!” It didn’t quite scan, but the kind of people who chant that stuff aren’t picky.

  A lot of them were carrying signs that said things like, “F*ck White Supremacists” and “Hate Speech is Violence.”

  And some of them were dressed in black, with black masks, and carrying sticks rather than signs.

  I sighed. “It’s too damned hot for this. Let’s go over to the Student Union and enjoy the air conditioning until they let us back in the building.”

  “The Student Union,” Ben informed me, “is where these thugs are headed.”

  “Who you calling thugs?” someone shouted at him. We ignored the noisy thug.

  “Oh. Let me guess. Somebody dared to invite a speaker they don’t approve of?”

  As the “No Nazis” bunch moved off, a new bunch of people started a couple of different chants. “Zionism is Fascism!” warred with “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

  “An aide to the Israeli ambassador,” Ben said. “Apparently speaking while Jewish is now a hate crime.”

  A guy with a megaphone shoved between us. “-TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!” blared in our faces. “NO HATE SPEECH!”

  “Look, you idiot, have you listened to what you’re chanting?” Ben demanded. “From the river to the sea,” implies no Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean coast, which means you want to wipe out the entire state of Israel. How is that not hate speech?”

  “Nazi!” One of the guys in black – not the one wielding the megaphone - swung a stick at Ben. A silver blur streaked from the ground and wound itself around the stick. The black-clad protestor shrieked and dropped his stick. “Gerritoffme! It’s alive!” Mr. M. hissed at him: something rude in Babylonian, probably.

  “Mr. M! Up here!” I grabbed the stick and slung him around my neck before he could get trampled. At the same time the sky darkened to deep blue, the air quivered and the noise of the crowd seemed suddenly distant.

  “Move it!” Ben urged. “I don’t know how long I can keep camouflage over all of us.”

  Well. At least he had finally done something intelligent. He was about due for that, after setting the office on fire and getting into a fight with a Black Bloc thug.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away!”

  Forming into a reasonably compact group, we shuffled west, heading for Guadalupe. Afterwards, I remembered vignettes that I hadn’t consciously noted at the time.

  Jimmy DiGrazio, our resident computer nerd, was so pale that he seemed reduced to nothing but red hair and freckles, but he was keeping his body between the protestors and Ingrid. Ingrid’s hair was coming down and that was a bad sign; all we needed was for her to go Viking Shield-Maiden on a campus mob. Lensky had drawn his weapon, and that was an even worse sign.

  I poured all my energy and a handful of my own stars into Ben’s camouflage. Technically it was an open cover of a surface composed of subsets from the background, kind of like Photoshop’s Smart Fill. People saw whatever was immediately behind the camouflaged area. Covering a group this large, that didn’t exactly make us inconspicuous – the original intent of the application - but it confused the heck out of the hostile masses and probably made some of them feel seasick. At any rate, they resumed their march on the Student Union and didn’t follow us.

  Given the energy Ben and I were pouring into camouflage, there was one obvious destination. At the corner of 24th and Guadalupe, we dropped the application; it’s really not a good idea to be even quasi-invisible when you’re crossing a street full of Texas drivers. On the far side of Guadalupe, Ben and I turned as one towards the doughnut shop and the herd followed us.

  “I like that new hire,” Lensky, beside me, said. I saw with relief that he had holstered his weapon. “He has the right idea on how to deal with you.”

  I glowered, but without much force. I did not agree that manhandling me was appropriate under any circumstances, but I was too shaky to get into it now.

  We descended on the doughnut shop like a flock of starving grackles. After fire, flood and protest even the normal people among us wanted comfort in the form of glazed doughnuts. Ben, Mr. M. and I needed a sugar fix after pouring out our energy against the mob. I found a booth and encouraged Lensky to bring a plate of whatever they had this afternoon. While he was collecting supplies, Ben slid into the booth beside me.

  “You know what would be really useful?”

  “Not setting the office on fire?” I suggested.

  “I didn’t…. um… intend to,” he finished weakly. “No, listen. I just thought of this. We can all do camouflage now, right?”

  “Well, you and I can.”

  Ingrid Thorn took the opposite side of the booth. “And I can.”

  I glowered at her. At the moment I had plenty of glower to share with the world. “Didn’t notice you doing much to help hold the application steady just now.”

  “She’s got things on her mind.” Jimmy DiGrazio seated himself next to Ingrid. “Anyway, you two were doing just fine.”

  “I don’t need you to defend me!” Ingrid snapped.

  “Keep your mitts off the doughnuts, Princess, or you will need a defender,” I warned her as Lensky plunked down a plate of glazed, chocolate, and cream-filled doughnuts. He grabbed a spare chair and pulled it up to the end of the booth, straddling it and watching while Ben and I fell on the goodies. We usually try not to stress ourselves to the point of dangerously low blood sugar; sometimes we even succeed. This had not been one of those times.

  Even Mr. M. needed refueling, though he contented himself with shimmying down my neck to nibble the bright pink icing and multicolored sprinkles off one doughnut. He washed it down with a cup of coffee. We never had figured out where a being consisting of two inches of turtle head and neck joined to three feet of prosthetic snake put the stuff he consumed, but he did require semi-regular feedings to keep his energy up.

  The trick was not giving him too much energy food at one time. I quietly shoved the doughnut plate away from us. There wasn’t much left anyway; Ben and I had inhaled everything with chocolate on or in it, and Jimmy and Lensky had taken care of most of what was left. Ingrid gave a pained glance at the remains of the strawberry doughnut Mr. M. had been working on and sipped her low-fat, decaf latte.

  I stole a sip of Mr. M.’s coffee to wash down the doughnuts. I’d tri
ed to dilute it enough that he wouldn’t get a caffeine high – caffeine has unpredictable effects on him - but he’d persuaded someone to put enough sugar in it to make up for that. I wondered what he was like on a sugar high. I made a face. “This isn’t coffee, it’s coffee-flavored syrup. Any more sugar, and you’d have the kind of stuff my mother pours over baklava.”

  “Baklava…” Ben sighed. “I could go for that kind of refill. Lia, why don’t you invite your mother to make us a tray of baklava? Classier than doughnuts, and more nutritious.”

  I stared. “Nutritious?” Mom’s baklava was delicious, but it was definitely a Category Three Greek dessert. (The three categories: Too Sweet, Sickeningly Sweet, and Instant Diabetic Coma.)

  “Well, it’s got that nut filling. And your mother’s generous with the ground nuts. It’s the best baklava in Texas,” Ben said. “Possibly the best in the United States.”

  This is the kind of complication that having a family in town causes. Being able to live at home while attending classes was all that had made going to the university financially possible for me, but it did have some downsides. One was that I’d had to spend four years listening to my father’s two favorite rants. The first was that a university education was wasted on a girl who would only marry and have babies; the second was that by getting said university education, especially a degree in mathematics of all things, I’d made myself into a freak that no man would ever want.

  Another problem was that my family had latched onto Ben, the only male who’d ever dared to identify himself to the family as my friend, as my only hope of avoiding shameful spinsterhood. My father asked his opinion about politics, my mother made him the Greek delicacies I’d never learned to cook, and Ben, the shameless scrounger, ate up the attention and the goodies and never ever mentioned that he was desperately in love with our receptionist, Annelise.

  Mr. M. had started swaying back and forth and crooning softly to himself. Ever since Meadow equipped him with wi-fi he’d enjoyed streaming songs off the Internet. This month he was into the Victorian era. I could just hear, “The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well.” Probably a comment on what we hadn’t used in the recent fire-fighting effort. I should probably get him out of the shop before he went for full volume on, “How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood.” Ignoring, of course, that the scenes of his childhood had probably been mud-brick hovels in Babylon.

  Now Ben picked the last crumbs off the doughnut platter and returned to his latest Bright Idea. “Camouflage makes a sort of sphere of unnoticeableness around us. Well, it does if you’re only camouflaging one person and they aren’t moving too much, which is what I was shooting for initially.”

  “You have an idea of how to generalize it for crowds?”

  “Better than that. What if we could make a zone of physical safety around us?”

  “A shield sphere?”

  I liked the idea, but there were technical reasons why the camouflage open cover system wouldn’t work. Still, it was worth thinking about; there must be some topological construct that would have the effect of repelling… “What do we want the shield to repel?”

  “Everything?”

  “Including oxygen?”

  “Oh.” Ben blinked rapidly. If he’d been a GPS, he would be droning, “Recalculating… recalculating…”

  “I’ll think about the specs and get back to you,” he said when the blinking slowed.

  “Do that. Before experimenting, please. I don’t want to watch you suffocating because you locked yourself into a shield that’s too powerful.”

  Lensky was quietly shaking his head in bemusement. He thinks it says a lot about our group that I usually wind up being the voice of reason and restraint. Basically, he thinks it explains why we so frequently come up short on both qualities.

  Sometimes I pick a fight with him over that attitude, but today I was inclined to cut him some slack. He must be finding it intensely frustrating that I’d been in a dangerous situation – well, potentially dangerous – and it was in no way, shape or form my fault, so he couldn’t yell at me over it. Well, anyway he wouldn’t have an excuse to yell at me. He didn’t always require one.

  Jimmy DiGrazio volunteered to walk back over to Allandale House to estimate the damage and to find out whether we could get back in yet. My jaw dropped slightly when Ingrid said she’d go with him. She gave me a defiant look. “I didn’t strew my notes all over the office floor. They were on my desk. And I hope they’re still there.”

  Notes about what? I wondered. Ingrid had spent a lot of time lately staring at her office wall. She hadn’t said what, if anything, she was working on. But evidently it was so absorbing that she couldn’t even spare some attention to help Ben and me maintain camouflage over the entire staff of the Center.

  Colton Edwards took the bench seat that Jimmy and Ingrid vacated. He needed the whole bench. He wasn’t much taller than Jimmy, but he was bulky with it; his knees didn’t want to fit under the table and his shoulders practically filled the space above the table. I envisioned strenuous West Texas summers roping cattle, or forking hay, or whatever farmers did to pass the time.

  “I hope you’re not rethinking your job application,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he assured us. “You could say a number of things about the last hour, but boring doesn’t enter into it. This is a lot better than a cotton farm in the Panhandle. Only I was wondering… Does this sort of thing happen often?”

  “We’re a research facility,” Ben said, rather stiffly. “We do research, which by definition means that we cannot predict how experiments will turn out.”

  Colton nodded. “Understood. I was just wondering why you don’t have a couple of fire extinguishers around.”

  “The trustees,” I told him, “decided that we should rely on water. They are concerned about the deleterious effects of the chemicals in fire extinguishers on the building’s fabric.”

  “Seems to me an actual fire is a lot worse for the building.”

  “Feel free to make your point to the trustees. Ben and I aren’t in a very good position to argue with them right now; they will blame us for whatever damage occurred today.”

  Ben blinked and gave me a tentative smile. “Lia, you don’t need to…”

  I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “Su batalla es mi batalla, remember? We’re in this together.”

  But we went home separately. Ben had a minuscule place south of the river; I was headed for a condo several miles north of campus. When the doughnut shop restroom was empty, I pictured the carpeted living room and teleported.

  When he got permanently assigned to the Center in June, Lensky had bought himself a condo about halfway between the university and his sister-in-law Pam's place in North Austin. He had one of the best quality campus parking permits (and don't ask me how he wangled that), so living near campus wasn't quite as important to him as it was to us lowly research fellows who occupied some kind of limbo, being neither real students nor real University employees. Although I shouldn't complain, since one of the perks of being a research fellow of our very own Center was the ability to teleport ourselves almost instantaneously to any location we’d seen before. As long as no one was looking. Being seen to vanish into thin air or to pop into existence out of it was something we tried very hard to avoid, as it led to, at best, tedious "explanations" and a lot of lies to keep straight and, at worst, to nervous breakdowns and extended stays at Shoal Creek Mental Hospital. For the witnesses, not for us.

  Mostly we just teleported between the private side of the Research Division and our apartments. Ingrid and I actually shared an apartment, but we had a ladies' agreement to keep the teleporting to our separate bedrooms, so one of us could entertain an outsider without being worried that the other one would upset the visitor with a sudden appearance.

  Lensky, of course, was not exactly an outsider, and after the first month or so he was pretty well hardened to little rips in
the fabric of the universe. But I still preferred to visit him at his condo rather than having him over to our apartment. The air conditioning was better. The bed was incomparably better. And Ingrid, who was so sensitive to noise that she complained about the groaning pipes in our aging apartment building, really did not like listening to encounters that did occasionally - oh, all right, usually - generate a certain amount of noise. I blamed Lensky, who had an energetic and aggressive sexual style that an uninformed observer might have found hard to distinguish from rape. He, in turn, mentioned my lack of inhibitions and tendency to scream at certain significant moments.

  Ingrid said we were both depraved animals and that she'd get more sleep in the monkey house at the zoo.

  Comments like those made me doubt that Jimmy, our in-house computer jockey, would ever get beyond the hopeless crush stage of his infatuation with Ingrid. It seemed possible that she would find any kind of physical encounter too coarse to consider.

  "It's not absolutely necessary to conduct sexual encounters with the kind of untrammeled enthusiasm you bring to the enterprise," Lensky said when I mentioned my concern for Jimmy.

  "Is that a complaint?"

  "By no means. I just mean that there are people who do not completely forget decorum in their intimate moments. Poor bastards. I myself would not willingly forgo the experience of - to mention just one example - seeing just how fast you can shed your clothes."

  "Animal. It's a matter of wardrobe defense: shed or be shredded. Around you, anything I can't take off in fifteen seconds or less is liable to get ripped from my body. I can't afford the kind of lingerie replacement that would be necessary if I let you have your way with me."

  "Whose way would you like me to have with you?"

  "Ha-ha, very funny."

  Lensky had inspired some changes in the way I dressed. I'd never previously seen the point of buying expensive fancy underwear. But I'd discovered that the sight of impractical silk and lace concoctions on my body made his eyes light up in a way I found very attractive. The catch was that, as I'd mentioned, he was often in too big a hurry to bear in mind trivial matters such as my desire to wear that seventy-five-buck purple set from Victoria's Secret more than once. So I'd developed the art of dropping my outer garments, giving him fifteen seconds to appreciate the lace and ribbons, then removing the fragile pieces before he did any damage to them.