An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  The foregoing discussion happened when I was putting the purple lace set back on, but it focused his attention so that I didn’t get the bra fastened for some time. He grabbed me by the hips and started experimenting with nibbling his way under the elastic, and all right, I kind of lost track of what I was doing for a little while there.

  Maybe there was some way to replace the elastic.

  By the time Lensky got to the condo this afternoon, I had gone through his refrigerator for something more substantial to supplement the doughnuts. After a light snack of string cheese, tomatoes and prosciutto I felt stable enough to welcome him home with a kiss that could be interpreted as a promise of later action.

  “You’re an expensive girlfriend,” he commented, looking at the remains of my snack. “I suppose you’ll still want dinner, even after gorging yourself on Mandola’s best prosciutto?”

  “Quit whining, you can afford to feed me.” The research fellows had to subsist on the miserable pittance that Dr. Verrick considered a reasonable stipend, and we all assumed he’d formed his fiscal views during a Depression-era childhood. (Never mind that this would make him about ninety; based on appearance he could have been anywhere from seventy to a hundred and ten, and none of us had the nerve to ask him.) Lensky, on the other hand, was paid by the three-letter agency that secretly funded the Center, and pulled down what would have been a comfortable middle-class income even in D.C. “You didn’t want me to faint on the carpet after whisking myself home, did you?”

  “I would have given you a ride.” He tossed his sport jacket on the couch and picked me up for a one-armed hug.

  “You can do that now.” I batted my eyelashes and tried for the sexy undertone that suffused his double-entendres. I don’t think I was doing it quite right; he laughed.

  “Later. What did you think of Verrick’s latest discovery?”

  “Short on theory, but impressively unflappable. On the whole that’s better than the other way round. He can learn the math.” I nibbled gently on Lensky’s neck. “He’ll need some intensive tutoring at first, though, just to get up to speed on our work. I’ll ask Ingrid to take him under her wing; she doesn’t seem to be doing anything else.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Did I bite too hard?”

  “No… it’s the concept of Ingrid as mentor to the fresh young recruit. I’d as soon be mentored by a barbed wire fence.”

  “Well, the kid’s from the Panhandle; he’s probably familiar with barbed wire. Good training for dealing with Ingrid.”

  “Better him than me,” Lensky said, putting his other arm around me and scooting me up to where I could reach his mouth. And I really felt like kissing him just then. It was still a mystery to me why he’d become obsessed with a short, dark girl with no figure to speak of, when there was a Valkyrie like Ingrid in the same office. But until he got over his unnatural obsession, I intended to take full advantage of it.

  A finite set of stars

  Chapter 3

  Two days later, Colton Edwards clomped up the stairs cradling two bright green cylinders, each about eighteen inches long and equipped with squeeze handles on one end. Amateurishly stenciled on one, in bright white caps, were the words, “THIS IS NOT A FIRE EXTINGUISHER.” The other one read, “IN CASE OF FIRE, DO NOT USE.” He offered his load to me. “Thought you might have a use for these.”

  “I like the way he thinks,” Ben said, taking one of the non-fire-extinguishers.

  “I like the way he doesn’t talk all the time,” said Ingrid, taking the other one.

  In an atmosphere of general staff approval, Colton plunged into the finer points of open covers on surfaces (Camouflage) and the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem (Teleportation). It must have been rough, getting hit with these concepts without the lead-in of weeks or even months to establish the basic ideas underlying them, but he didn’t complain. When I asked her, Ingrid said he was picking up the core concepts remarkably fast.

  “In a way,” she said thoughtfully, “I feel he’s wasted here. Anybody who can get up to speed this fast with no more than a year of topology to prepare him… He might have a real future as a proper mathematician, you know? I wonder if I should encourage him to take more real classes. He might even be able to get a second degree in pure math.”

  “If that were what he wanted, he could have gone for it on his own without taking a detour past the Center. Not everybody wants the pure academic life.” It occurred to me that we had spoken so little recently, I was embarrassingly ignorant about what was going on with Ingrid. “Speaking of which, aren’t you up for qualifiers this fall?”

  “Oh, I passed,” she said, with all the excitement of someone announcing that Dr. Verrick had brought in more of his uniquely bad, cut-rate coffee packets for the break room.

  “And didn’t even mention it?” The last time I remembered Ingrid being this casual about an academic success was… never.

  “Um. I have a lot to think about,” she said, and drifted off to give Colton some grief about his reading of the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem. She must have inspired him to practice, because the rest of the day was punctuated by little thuds from his office, like somebody teleporting six inches and landing slightly harder than necessary.

  “I think he’s ready for stars,” she said the next day.

  It seemed awfully fast to me.

  “He’s tested on Camouflage and Brouwer now, and his performance without stars is impeccable but weak. Just like we were before last spring.”

  That was when we’d encountered Mr. M., a Mesopotamian box turtle mage who had then been crippled by a magic-suppressing ring. A series of events, not all of them unfortunate, had led to his (non-fatal) beheading, the disappearance of the ring, and Meadow Melendez’ fixing him up with a robot snake prosthesis. The same events had freed an infinite set of tiny, twinkling blue-white points of light which we called stars and which Mr. M. referred to as the Lights of the Medes. Holding a cloud of the stars had the effect of amplifying any other magic by an order of magnitude or more. Learning to use them had pitchforked us into some difficult and dangerous situations, and we were still working on calibrating the effects; the concept of turning Colton loose with them after half a week of training made me very nervous.

  “How about just a finite set, for starters? A small finite set,” I emphasized. Since the stars themselves comprised an infinite set and could be subdivided into infinitely many infinite subsets, there was no shortage of them; Ingrid could give Colton infinitely many stars without depleting her own collection. (And if that sentence makes you dizzy, welcome to my world.) Ben had discovered that a finite subset of stars made it possible to amplify effects without losing control, and I thought that might be a reasonable next step up for Colton.

  “Okay… but Lensky’s in a hurry for him to qualify.” Ingrid winced slightly on that last word, and I wondered if her qualifiers had been traumatic in some way that she didn’t care to discuss. It couldn’t have been that bad; she’d passed, hadn’t she?

  And what was Lensky’s hurry, and why hadn’t he discussed it with me?

  People. Mathematics was easy by comparison. After Ingrid left, I went back to thinking about Ben’s idea of personal shields. We’d decided that we wanted to allow small things – like oxygen molecules – to pass through the shields. He was looking for some way to define the largest possible object that could pass. I was starting on the other end, beginning with things we definitely did want to block. Which came down, I thought, to objects with serious kinetic energy. Bullets, for instance. Sticks swung with malicious intent, like the one Ben had nearly been bashed with the day of the protest mob.

  Of course, this still left the possibility of somebody slowly sliding a knife through the shield. Not to mention that it was no protection against tear gas or even pepper spray. But I thought something that would stop a speeding bullet would be pretty nifty in its own right, and maybe the concept of branching covers would do that if I could just think about it sideways, so to sp
eak.

  Sideways… There was a flash of movement outside the window, and the sunlight was blocked. Oh. Colton Edwards was standing on the minuscule balcony – one of those quaint little architectural details in which Allandale House abounded. He was large enough to block a lot of light. As I glared at him, he vanished and the sunlight came streaming in, full force, again.

  He thumped and bumped around the Research Division for over an hour, making cameo appearances in my office and Ben’s and traveling a bumpy path around the entire building from balcony to balcony, before I slammed my books shut and went to speak to Ingrid.

  “Please ask Mr. Edwards to confine his practice with the stars to the camouflage algorithm. He clearly lacks the control for seamless Brouwer teleportation and he is driving me crazy.”

  Ingrid sighed but agreed.

  “It’s a good thing you only gave him a finite set of stars to test out,” I commented. “At least you can take them all back if he doesn’t rein in the exuberance of his experiments.”

  I thought Ingrid looked a bit shifty at this comment, but then I looked more closely. Much more than shifty, she looked miserable. She was twisting her fingers and biting her lip and generally behaving as little like a Valkyrie as I’d ever seen her. “Ingrid, what’s the matter? Even if you overdid it and let him have an infinite set of stars, it’s not the end of the world.”

  “It’s not – that,” she said jerkily, and then stopped altogether.

  “Then what is it?” It struck me that I hadn’t been much of a companion, or a roommate, in the last couple of months. I still kept clothes and books at the apartment Ingrid and I shared north of campus, and I still paid my share of the rent, but I was over at Lensky’s condo most nights of the week. I’d always thought of Ingrid as a blonde-braided Force of Nature, but was it possible she needed more from me than rent money?

  Did she need a friend?

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, “you were never serious about graduate school anyway.”

  Suddenly I found myself sympathizing with Lensky’s complaint that we were all insufferable intellectual snobs. It wasn’t fun being on the short end of that particular stick. I began downgrading my expectations of what I could offer. Scratch “friend,” settle for “warm-blooded and English-speaking.”

  “Something about your qualifiers,” I guessed, and saw her wince. An unthinkable thought occurred to me. “You did pass?” Would Ingrid lie about something like that? I had no basis for comparison; in the time that I’d known her she hadn’t had any academic failures to conceal.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sounding about as excited as if she’d just discovered a nice clean notepad in her desk. “I passed. And I have no more course work to do. I just need to attend occasional seminars and come up with a topic for my dissertation.”

  “Are you having trouble thinking of a topic?”

  “Are you kidding? I’ve come up with three ideas.”

  “Overachiever.”

  “None of which,” she said wearily, “I can concentrate on in an environment of random fires and clumping clodhoppers.”

  Well, at least she didn’t add “excitable Greeks,” to the list this time. Or “overly enthusiastic computer nerds.” Was it a good sign that Jimmy DiGrazio and I were at least temporarily off her shit list?

  I’d probably go right back on it if I pointed out that she’d created the “clumping clodhopper” problem all by her little self.

  “Umm… Dr. Verrick could probably arrange for you to get a carrel in the math department.”

  “It’s not just the distractions in the workplace, Thalia. You wouldn’t understand, because a serious mathematics career was never an option for you anyway.”

  I bit my tongue to stifle the automatic, “Sez who?” and, for once in my life, just listened.

  “Doing original mathematics research requires my complete concentration. And it doesn’t stop with the dissertation. You may not have thought about what’s expected after one gets a Ph.D., since it’s not an issue for you, but doing well post-doc means doing more research, and more publications, and teaching, and faculty meetings.”

  “Surely that isn’t exactly a surprise to you? I thought you’d planned your entire life around just that.”

  Ingrid sighed. “I had. What I hadn’t planned on was the Center. Don’t you see, Lia, there’s no place in the life I meant to lead for fiddling around with irrelevant stuff like teleportation, and invisibility, and… everything that’s fun.”

  Okay, now I did get the dimensions of the problem. The difficulty I’d experienced in thinking about branching covers while Colton Edwards thumped around on the balconies was trivial compared to what Ingrid would face if she tried to combine life as a Center research fellow with the conventional life of a Ph.D. candidate, post-doc researcher, and up-and-coming young professor.

  And Ingrid was the kind of person who planned her life down to the last detail. I’d known her to get bent out of shape because she’d planned to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and I’d polished off the last of the crunchy peanut butter for breakfast. I could only guess what it was doing to her to realize that the two parts of her perfectly planned life were heading in opposite directions at warp speed.

  “You’re right,” I said quietly. “I didn’t understand. I’ll – I’ll leave you to think it over in peace, shall I? And Ingrid, one thing: I’ll understand if you decide you have to leave the Center, but I do hope – very much – that you will stay with us.”

  But what were the odds? What could we offer? Peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of her life, and twenty years in jail if she even thought about publishing her results? I had a feeling the Center was about to be short-staffed again.

  Maybe that was why Lensky was so eager to get Colton Edwards up to speed.

  They were having a friendly drink at Corbin’s private club, a space of dark polished floors and heavy curtains, shadows and coolness and privacy. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember which of them had raised the subject first. But Corbin appeared to have a genuine concern for the reputation of the university, and specifically for his department. Or – what should have been his department.

  “Technically,” he pointed out, “I’m in the Education Department, specializing in development of mathematics education tools.”

  Corbin waved this distinction aside. “Mathematics, Math Education, what difference is there?”

  He’d often thought that himself.

  “In any case,” Corbin went on, “everybody at this campus who’s connected with mathematics will suffer if this so-called Center for Applied Topology isn’t reined in. Verrick’s too old, practically senile if you ask me. He barely supervises the researchers, and as a result they’re totally out of control. One of them set the building on fire the other day! And what makes it worse is that they’re claiming paranormal powers. You know what even a hint of that kind of insanity does to an academic reputation.”

  Oh, yes. He knew all too well. Privately, he thought that old scandal was why the mathematics department at UNC hadn’t accepted him as a doctoral candidate, why he’d been shunted off into the sidestream of math education.

  “I share your concern,” he said stiffly, resolving never to have any contact with the Center for Applied Topology. “But I’m hardly in a position to do anything about it.”

  Corbin smiled. “It needn’t remain Verrick’s pet project. Another disaster like the fire, and the Dean will see the necessity of putting someone younger and more dynamic in charge of the Center. Someone who will refocus the researchers on practical applications of topology. Someone who will put a stop to all this loose talk of paranormal powers.”

  He sat a little straighter and took a deep breath. Director of a privately funded mathematical research Center! It would be an ideal position – no teaching requirements, no pressure to publish – his name would, of course, be added to any publications the research fellows came up with – and best of all, no more feeling like
a second-class citizen around the real mathematicians.

  But it was only a pipe dream. “I hope this Center does, some day, enjoy the benefit of such a director. But there’s been no mention of replacing Verrick, much less of who might be in the running for the position.” Certainly not an obscure assistant professor in the Education department. He doubted the Dean even knew his name.

  “These things are often settled privately before the open discussion even begins,” Corbin said. “For instance, the Dean wouldn’t want to name a new Director without some assurance that the candidate sympathized with these larger goals and was willing to serve in the position.”

  “Are you telling me that…”

  “I’m not telling you anything.” Corbin winked at him. “I’m just finding out what I need to know. But I think the Dean will be very interested in this conversation.”

  Close enough without sharing body parts

  Chapter 4

  It was Friday before I found out what Lensky’s hurry was.

  We didn’t usually spend Friday nights together. That was his night for dinner with his sister-in-law and niece, whose move to Austin had been one of the things that originally interested him in working with the Center. And it was, whenever I couldn’t get out of it, my night to dine with the family and undergo the weekly inquisition. My father had always been somewhat monomaniacal about getting me married off, preferably before I could do something to bring eternal shame on the family – exactly what, he refused to specify. I’d had years of practice in ignoring him. But this year my mother’s best friend’s son had, with a little help from his wife, produced twin boys. Mom was one down in bragging rights, and she wasn’t a woman to accept such a situation permanently. She’d taken to breathing down my neck and inviting nice Greek Orthodox boys to dinner. The woman had bad grandchild fever.