An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  So I was quite receptive when, after a leisurely lunch in his condo, Lensky asked if I could bear to miss the family dinner that night.

  “They’ll kill me, but yes. I’d rather do just about anything else.”

  He knew that, of course. And yet he’d spent much of this lunch hour – hours, really – getting me into an extremely receptive mood. That did tend to happen on Friday afternoons, but today had been – in retrospect – an extraordinarily special effort. I should have been suspicious, but I was feeling too good.

  “I could call and explain that we need you to work,” he offered.

  “No. You really do not understand how my mother will react to the sound of a man’s voice discussing me. She’ll nominate you for Ben’s competition immediately. No, given that someone in your family has already reproduced, she’ll put out a contract on Ben and order us Greek wedding crowns off eBay before you know what hit you.”

  He looked amused, but that was only because he didn’t know my family. If he’d realized the full extent of the danger, trust me, he’d have been panicking. “You’re going to have to introduce me eventually, you know.”

  “Eh, maybe, maybe not. You might die, I might die, or the horse might talk,” I said, referring to a corny joke he told much too often. It was true I didn’t have a perfect strategy for dealing with my family – other than trying to persuade Lensky to help me get into the Witness Protection Program – but that was no reason to give up my less-than-perfect strategies of delay, dissimulation and denial.

  “Well, you can tell them it’s a work thing that your boss sprung on you at the last minute.”

  “That’ll help. They have great respect for Dr. Verrick.”

  “You couldn’t have said they have great respect for me?”

  “How could they? They don’t even know you exist. Anyway, you’re not my boss.”

  He looked wistful but did not pursue the point. Lensky has authoritarian tendencies; he’d love to be the boss of me, but even he had to admit the Center wasn’t structured that way.

  “Are you going to be working this mysterious assignment too?”

  He looked even more wistful. “Can’t. In fact, I won’t even be around this afternoon and evening. It’s Torture-the-Parents night at Linda’s school. I have to go and meet all her teachers.”

  It seemed to me that should have been Pam’s – Linda’s mother’s – problem, but Lensky had a low opinion of Pam’s parenting style and shoved his oar in whenever he could. Anyway, I knew that Linda adored her uncle and would be thrilled to tow him around the school, so it really was good that he was going to this thing. Next year she’d be thirteen and would probably refuse to acknowledge him or any other adult relative in public. He might as well enjoy the adoration while it lasted.

  What Lensky wanted me to do tonight, it turned out, was to infiltrate a group he’d had his eye on for some time. We must not be giving him enough problems at the Center; he was reverting to his spook practice of suspecting everybody, of everything, all the time. He tells me that slight paranoia is a feature, not a bug, of good agency officers.

  In this case he was looking, or trying to look, at what seemed to be a grass-roots campus group dedicated to protesting everything, about everybody, all the time. Lensky’s mirror image, as it were.

  “Student protests aren’t something for your agency to be concerned about, are they? They’re mostly silly and ineffective, anyway.”

  Lensky scowled. “You only think that because you haven’t been paying attention. In Berkeley they’ve escalated to serious property damage, and it’s only a matter of time before people get badly hurt.”

  “Still not within your remit. Anyway, this is Austin. Our protestors are typical Austin slackers; they’re too lazy to break any windows.”

  “Like the guy that tried to kill Ben the other day?”

  “I don’t think he was actually trying to kill Ben.”

  “I’ve studied some cell phone videos of the confrontation. If your snake-bot hadn’t intervened… That fellow was swinging his stick hard enough to do serious damage. If it had connected with Ben’s head or neck he’d be in the hospital now. Or possibly the morgue. Somehow the turtle-snake soaked up most of the kinetic energy.”

  “He’s got a name.” Lensky had come a long way – for a normal person – towards accepting our Mr. M., but he did keep using these depersonalizing descriptions. “If you can’t bring yourself to call him Mr. M., you could learn to wrap your tongue around Niiqarquusu Adrahasis Galammta-uddua.”

  “Actually, I don’t think I could. And you’re changing the subject. Look, these people present themselves as just another leftist protest group, but the inner circle has locked-door meetings. I want to know what goes on there. And they’ve made a lot of noise about sanctuary city policies, which does bring their activities into the set of things I can legitimately investigate.”

  “So you want one of us to infiltrate?”

  “Two of you,” Lensky said sharply. “I do not want you or anybody else taking off on this without backup. You can’t take Ben, because the videos from the other day are all over the Internet and his face is clearly visible. I’m not asking Ingrid because I don’t want to listen to her righteous No Borders speech again, especially the mood she’s been in lately. Anyway, I don’t feel good about sending two women into a group like that. So – is Colton up to it? I know he’s been working on teleportation.”

  “Probably.” Lensky didn’t really understand what we did; if I’d never seen the inside of the meeting room and couldn’t picture it, I couldn’t teleport into it. But I figured our application of camouflage would let us slip in behind some real members of the group, and if need be I was strong enough to teleport both of us out again. And Colton hadn’t just been working on camouflage, he had mastered it. So, no problem.

  “All right, then. Talk to Colton this afternoon. If he can do it, the two of you go check out this meeting. It’ll probably be the usual boring half-baked political stuff and the locked-door policy is just to make them feel important, but I want to know it’s nothing more before I tell my boss not to worry about this group.”

  Colton was not just willing but enthusiastic about the project. You’d think he’d been waiting all his life for the chance to infiltrate a super-secretive group that included people capable of serious violence. Maybe he had been, at that; his description of the family farm sounded like something that would only be survivable with the help of a very active fantasy life.

  “The farm is probably exactly that boring,” Ingrid said after Colton had agreed to help out and I’d persuaded her to drop the math tutoring for the rest of the day so that he could practice his camouflage skills. “I grew up in a little Texas town where the big amusement was watching the Coca-Cola bottling plant through a plate glass wall… and the bottling plant shut down when I was ten. Britfield’s been slowly dying ever since. Colton said his family’s farm is miles outside the nearest town, and even when you get to the town, well, you’re still in the Panhandle. That’s probably even worse than living in Britfield.”

  There was a loud thump on the balcony outside Ingrid’s office and we saw Colton for a moment. Then he disappeared, although the brickwork on the low outer wall did seem to be strangely warped. “Colton,” Ingrid shouted at the window, “just do camouflage, all right? Do not try to combine it with teleportation!”

  “I’m not sure he really understands the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem yet,” she told me after the balcony reverted to its normal appearance. “There’s something wrong with his implementation; he keeps teleporting to about six inches above where he should be aiming.”

  “I’ve noticed. But he won’t need to teleport tonight. I’m taking a pocketful of stars; if there’s any problem, I can port us both out of the meeting.”

  What neither Ingrid nor I realized at the time was that the problem was not Colton’s understanding of the theorem; it was what he was trying to do with it.

  The afternoon set
tled into a pattern. The thuds and thumps around Colton got louder and more frequent. Ingrid yelled at him. Everything went quiet… for a while. Then the first tentative, muffled thuds would begin again, build up to a symphony of clumps and clanks, and stop suddenly when one of us yelled at Colton to cut it out.

  At least he wasn’t trying to combine it with camouflage, I thought when he began bouncing off my balcony. He wasn’t a mere six inches short of his goal, either; he first materialized a good two feet above the surface. I stopped – briefly – being annoyed with him and winced in sympathy as he made a hard landing on the bricks outside.

  But that was nothing compared to his final landing.

  I caught a glimpse of him through the window again, hurtling down onto the balcony from at least five feet above it. Except this time he wasn’t going to land on the balcony; one foot was on the near side of the low wall and the rest of him was on the far side.

  His big, clumsy boot caught on the tiles at the top of the wall. He cartwheeled a hundred and eighty degrees and then the weight of his falling body yanked that one foot off the balcony wall and I heard a series of crashes at approximately ground level.

  “Brouwer!” I said, picturing the sidewalk that snaked around the east side of Allandale House.

  Ben and Ingrid arrived almost at the same time I did, and I was deeply grateful for the fact that teleportation conformed to some of the laws of physics. Specifically, if your goal would result in your materializing within a space occupied by other objects, it would nudge us into the nearest open space. The three of us were quite close enough without sharing body parts.

  Today Ingrid got credit for Best Prepared Research Fellow; she’d grabbed her cell phone in the moment of teleportation, so she was able to call EMS while Ben and I helped Colton out of the bushes. He began cursing as soon as he was right side up and got really intense about it when he tried to stand.

  “Those are nice bushes, don’t insult them, they probably saved your life,” I told him. I was still shaky with the picture that had flashed into my mind when I heard him fall, still having trouble believing that he hadn’t tried to break the sidewalk with his skull.

  Oh well, if this exploit was any evidence, his head might actually be thick enough to break the cement. “What did you think you were doing?” Ben demanded.

  “Uh… Teleporting? Ow!” Colton abruptly gave up any attempt to put weight on his left foot and collapsed downward to sit on the grass. Always considerate, I plucked the leaves and broken twigs out of his hair.

  “Teleporting into mid-air? I have to admit that’s creative,” said Ben.

  Colton stared up at us. “I would have been flying. It could have worked. It did work. I just need to improve my landing technique.”

  “Is that why you’ve been thumping all over the office?” I demanded. “You weren’t trying to teleport to different office locations. You were trying to teleport to six inches above your pictured location.”

  “Which didn’t give me time to slow my fall,” Colton explained. “I figured that three stories would be a long enough fall that I’d have time to control it.” He shifted his weight slightly and winced. “It sure felt long enough.”

  The EMTs wanted to take Colton to Seton Hospital for more X-rays, but agreed that their portable X-ray machine didn’t show any breaks, it was probably just a bad sprain, and they could wrap him up on the spot. Of course, they didn’t know he’d fallen nearly three stories; all we told them was that he’d tripped over a curb. Which was true enough, we just didn’t mention that the “curb” was a balcony off the third floor of Allandale House. Dr. Verrick holds that it’s not a lie if you simply refrain from telling all the relevant information and allow your listener to come to an incorrect conclusion. We do a lot of that kind of not-lying at the Center.

  “Actually, it’s probably more true than you realize, this time,” I told Ingrid and Ben. “I saw the beginnings of the fall. He’d gotten that foot hooked over the balcony and when his full weight pulled it down it came loose in what looked like an extremely awkward position. I think he really did sprain his ankle on the balcony. The fall only damaged his head.” I scowled at Colton. “Assuming that’s even possible.”

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” Colton apologized to me, “but I don’t think…”

  “No. You’d be both conspicuous and vulnerable, hobbling around on those crutches.”

  “And you can’t go by yourself.”

  That, I wasn’t so sure of. “Lensky said I wasn’t to do this without backup,” I said, and hoped that sounded like agreement to him.

  Actually, it didn’t mean I couldn’t go; it was just that my backup would have to be Mr. M., who is somewhat erratic. Compared to a new hire who thought he could fly, though, wasn’t Mr. M. the very epitome of stability?

  By force if necessary

  Chapter 5

  The meeting was to happen off-campus, naturally, the better to enforce the exclusion of outsiders. Since I wasn't familiar with the location, I had to walk over there after work. The building was an unmemorable rectangle of yellowish brick, surrounded by juniper bushes and a concrete sidewalk along one side. I made myself comfortable on the grass between two junipers, opened the textbook I'd brought along, thought really hard about open covers on spheres for a moment, and settled down to watch.

  One of the problems with camouflage is that if you're the source of the application, you can't see it in action. I'd experienced its light-bending effects during the protest the other day because Ben was the one who'd started generating camouflage. Today I was working on my own and the parts of myself that I could normally see were still perfectly visible as far as I was concerned. I didn't really have any doubts about my ability to maintain the visualization, but that was one reason I'd arrived early. If the first-comers - or anyone else - saw me, well, a lone student sitting on the grass with a math textbook was about as unthreatening as it got. They might chase me off but they were unlikely to be alarmed.

  And, of course, if they saw me it meant that camouflage wasn't working and my plan to slip into the meeting unnoticed would be a failure, so I might as well let them chase me away.

  My second problem wasn't exactly intrinsic to camouflage; it had to do with the nature of my new backup. Mr. M. didn't do sitting-and-waiting very well; he wanted to be entertained. And camouflage didn't interfere with sound transmission. I could think of some ways to generalize the effect, but nothing I was prepared to try on the spur of the moment. Instead I had to shush Mr. M. - and if you think that was easy, it's clear you've never tried to reason with a Babylonian turtle-mage.

  Not many people have, come to think of it.

  Finally I distracted Mr. M. with the chapter on Riemann geometry in the textbook I'd brought along with me. I'd thought that in case I was stuck with a long wait, I could use the time to try and puzzle out how Ben expected to use Riemann surfaces to conjure light, and - possibly more important - why he kept getting fire instead.

  That didn't work out, because either Mr. M. was faking it to intimidate me, or he really could read and absorb information significantly faster than I could. What I mostly did for the half-hour before the meeting's scheduled start time was turn pages.

  And wonder if Meadow could fix up Mr. M.'s prosthetic snake body with a hand, so that he could turn his own damned pages. Or two hands; then he could manage doorknobs. Or…

  The possibility of add-ons to the snakebot part of Mr. M. was so interesting that I temporarily forgot what I was supposed to be doing. Oh, I didn't drop the camouflage application - once I got that started, I could pretty well run it on automatic - but I drifted into a sort of reverie in which the only thing anchoring me to reality was the need to keep turning pages.

  I came out of it fast enough, though, when the first person to show up for the meeting complained of hearing "a sinister rustling sound" among the bushes. My hand froze on the page and I rechecked the application. My camouflage seemed to still be in place. Mr. M. opened his bea
k, probably to complain that I'd stopped turning pages for him, and I wrapped my left hand around his head.

  It was lucky for me that he interpreted that gesture as a polite suggestion to stay quiet rather than as an irritable "Shut up!" Otherwise I might be missing a thumb now. (Technically, he has a box turtle head, not a snapping turtle head. But he's also got impressive jaw muscles and a mean snap.)

  I felt happier once the guy who was being complained to pushed back the branches of the nearest juniper bush and said, "See? Nothing here."

  But I still waited for five minutes before abandoning my book and easing to my feet - something almost impossible to do without rustling. Not to mention shaking the junipers.

  Then I had to wait for another five minutes when a bunch of people all showed up at once and clogged the entryway where their ID's were being checked. A crowd like that wouldn't work for me; I needed a couple coming together or, better, a solitary attendee.

  And there he was, like an answer to prayer; a thick-set man with a slouch and a scowl, ambling up to the entryway all by himself. Not somebody I would have wanted to get close to, normally, but I was beginning to be afraid that I'd missed my chance to sneak in before the doors were locked.

  Of course the Center had a way to deal with locked doors, too, but the prime directive was to be inconspicuous.

  I followed Heavy-Set as closely as I could without brushing against him or inadvertently including him inside the camouflaged space surrounding me; closely enough to learn that his name was Bob and that he was someone important enough for the gatekeeper to be extremely polite to.