An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  Between Colton’s Britfield ordeal and the fact that Ingrid was pushing his practice so hard that he got shocky several times a day, he was once again getting most of Annelise’s concern and attention. And Ben was not taking it well. He griped that Annelise never bought his favorite kind of doughnut any more. He griped that she wasn’t supposed to disappear in the middle of the day to restock the pastry tray. He – well, he made a pesky, censorious nuisance of himself, and I wasn’t surprised that Ingrid and Colton started to avoid him. If I’d been paying attention I’d have noticed that they were avoiding me as well. But I was mostly griping about the unfairness of Fate, myself. I mean, by virtue of our talent for visualizing topological constructs and tying them to reality, the four of us already had a lot of non-standard life problems. It just didn’t seem fair that we also had to cope with standard problems like two nerdy young men competing over one Texas goddess.

  For that matter, it sometimes didn’t seem fair that I had to share working space with not one but two girls who were built on the goddess model, one tawny honey-blonde Texas beauty with legs up to here and one icy fair Scandinavian type with the kind of chest men tend to talk to instead of looking her in the eyes. But since Lensky, inexplicably, seldom even noticed Annelise or Ingrid when I was in the room, I really did not have much reason for complaint.

  Being whisked from Austin to Britfield in, subjectively, the blink of an eye, seemed to have given Jimmy a deeper understanding of Ingrid’s dilemma. Even though he couldn’t experience the bending of the universe the way she did, the mere fact of being able to go three hundred miles on the basis of a word and some mental pictures was exciting enough for him. He’d been happy to join us last year, when teleporting from one office to another had been the extent of our “magic.” Now that Ingrid had turned it into the kind of feat that only comic-book heroes and gaming characters had pulled off before, he was close to ecstatic.

  For a while Ingrid was too busy with Colton for Jimmy to strike up a “casual” conversation with her, but just after the day of random teleports around the open room Colton started getting a series of telephone calls that kept interrupting his training. Annelise told us that his family was giving him grief again. They still thought it was his duty to come home and repay their putting him through UT by spending the rest of his life as the farm’s business manager. And as he’d told her, “I don’t know if it’s my duty or not. I just know I’d rather die than give this up when I’ve only just started!”

  Naturally, this kind of comment garnered even more of Annelise’s sympathy. I’d have liked to be crabby with Colton about crying on our receptionist’s shoulder and distracting her from her work (not to mention distracting her from Ben, whose corner I was still in) but I couldn’t; the kid was obviously suffering. Being estranged from a family you wanted to be in wasn’t a situation I could even imagine. As you may have gathered, my problem is more one of being insufficiently estranged from a family that wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. But even I could see that despite getting stronger and stronger with Brouwer jumps every day, he was miserable.

  What with Ben and Colton and Ingrid all suffering, the misery quotient around the office was uncomfortably high. So, in my short-sighted way, I was pleased when Jimmy asked me to walk him into the private side so he could talk with Ingrid, saying he understood her dilemma better after that long jump they’d done together. It seemed to me she could do with a little sympathy and understanding.

  I have been wrong way too often in this life, but I have seldom been more wrong.

  The office partitions are thin, and Ingrid’s voice is clear and carrying. Jimmy was speaking so softly that I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Ingrid’s responses came through loud and clear.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Just because you’ve ridden along on a jump doesn’t mean you understand what it feels like to one of us.”

  He said something else and Ingrid snapped, “So you wouldn’t care to trade the little scrap of magic you get a share in for a boring life in the business world? That’s your problem. It’s nothing like what I’m dealing with. You can quit here and go work for your-father-the-CEO any time you please.”

  Another soft, placatory-sounding murmur from Jimmy and another snappy response from Ingrid. “No, I don’t have the same options you do. If I don’t go for the Ph.D. now I can’t rethink it and get back into the program later. I’m almost twenty-six. Do you have any idea what proportion of pure mathematicians do their most significant work before thirty?”

  And finally, “Teach? I don’t want to get a degree just so I can teach calculus to business majors! The only thing worth doing in mathematics is pure research. Discovering new mathematics. That’s what I’ve always planned to do.” I heard her pushing her chair back. “And now I’m going to a talk by a visiting professor who’s been doing exactly that. It’ll be a nice change from the casual attitude around here.”

  Her footsteps sounded brisk and impatient and very loud, then faded as she traversed the wall and headed downstairs.

  I sat at my own desk, folding a strip of paper into triangles and bleeding for Jimmy. It was no real surprise when he trailed into my office, though I was glad to see he retained enough awareness to bring his own chair. (As I may have mentioned, I find that not having chairs in the office discourages most visitors. Of course, being on the other side of a wall that can only be crossed by visualizing yourself walking along a Möbius strip knocks out most of them in the first place.)

  A look at his face confirmed my expectations. The misery quotient of the office had gone shooting right up into the stratosphere.

  “Well, that wasn’t a total waste,” he said after staring at his hands for a while. “I have a better understanding of where she’s coming from. And of course, she’s right. I can’t appreciate what she feels when she’s working, can I? I guess it was dumb of me to even try.”

  He seemed light-years removed from the ebullient young man who’d recently explained to me that Ingrid was going to marry him, she just didn’t know it yet.

  “She can’t appreciate what you feel when you’re working through a complex computer problem, either,” I said, re-folding my strip of paper so all the creases were reversed.

  Jimmy sighed. “Apparently it’s not the same… She’s really hurting, you know. I hadn’t understood about the time pressure she feels.”

  Suddenly I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Okay, she’s hurting, but why do you give her a license to take it out on you? It’s not like it’s your fault she’s in a bind between a Ph.D. and the Center. You tried to make her feel better and she dumped on you. Like she always does. Look at this West Texas excursion. She damn near got you and Colton arrested. You took care of her, protected her from having to make another jump in a weakened condition by driving three hundred miles to get everybody back to Austin. And she still treats you like a piece of the furniture!”

  I stopped myself in mid-rant, shocked by the expression on Jimmy’s face. I’d wanted to make him feel better and instead, here I was beating on him as badly as Ingrid did.

  “I’m a fool,” he said quietly, “and she’s behaving badly, but I still love her.”

  “That doesn’t give her a license to trample on you. Why don’t you stop letting her do that? In fact,” I said, warming to my theme, “why don’t you stop hovering, bringing her morning coffee, being there to pick her up whenever she trips? Maybe she’ll appreciate what she had in you more when she doesn’t have it for a while.” Oh, great. Auntie Thalia gives advice to the lovelorn. What did I know about love and relationships? Just enough to be terrified every time I realized how important Lensky had become to me. At best, this was an example of the astigmatic and seriously near-sighted leading the blind.

  Or it might even be the other way around.

  “You know, she patronizes me too,” I said while he was thinking this over. “So don’t go thinking you’re special! In fact, I can’t think of anybody here she doesn’t patronize… excep
t maybe Dr. Verrick.”

  Jimmy managed a half-hearted grin. “Now that’s something I’d pay to see.”

  “Me too, Jimmy. Me too.”

  The next morning I came in to find Colton systematically disposing of the last doughnuts on a tray that Annelise had presumably just filled. “Sorry,” he mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate glazed. “Have this?” He offered me the broken half of an apple fritter – all that remained on the tray.

  “Looks like we’re going to need a bigger doughnut budget,” I said, waving off his offer of the apple fritter. I hadn’t – yet – done anything to deplete my blood sugar.

  By the time I washed out and refilled my coffee mug, the apple fritter was gone too. “I gather you’ve just done a nice long jump?”

  “San Marcos and back!” he agreed with enthusiasm. “Solo!”

  I didn’t have to pretend to be impressed; I was impressed. Even envious. On his first solo he’d matched the distance that Ben and I had worked up to over a couple of months’ experimentation. Twice. “What did you use for a destination in San Marcos?”

  “Meadows Center,” he answered after energetically chewing and swallowing. “You know, Aquarena Springs? Where they have the glass bottom boat tour? My mother loves that tour. We drive down every year for her birthday.”

  Thinking about his family seemed to diminish his ebullience, and he was entitled to feel pretty damn good after a solo like that. I tried to redirect his attention. “So I’m guessing that much distance gave you time to really experience the in-between.” We never had come up with a good name for the blackness filled with glowing lines and points that happened between the beginning and the ending of a sufficiently long jump. Well, actually I suppose it happened with every jump, but the short jumps lasted less than a second and you really didn’t have time to see the scenery, let alone enjoy it.

  “The colors,” Colton beamed. “The lights! Nobody told me it was like that!”

  It’s possibly the second most exhilarating experience in the world, though Lensky would argue that getting shot at and missed should have that title. Ben had taken to calling the in-between “God’s Own Amusement Park,” but that seemed vaguely sacrilegious to me. Whatever we called it, trying to describe it refocused Colton on his achievement and reminded him of the Research Division’s worst-kept secret: our work, when it succeeds, is fun.

  “We ought to throw you a graduation party,” I said. “I’ll just step out and get some more doughnuts.” Jumping on nothing but caffeine – I usually don’t bother with breakfast – is not advised, but what the heck – I only had to go a few blocks.

  When I got back with a box full of chocolate glazed, sour cream, and cream filled doughnuts, the party mood was gone and there was nobody around to party with but Annelise. “He got another call from his sister,” Annelise told me.

  “How do you know?”

  “His voice. When he’s talking to her he sounds sad but not angry. When it’s his father or brother he sounds angry.”

  Hmmm.

  “Also, he picked up in the break room and said, ‘Now what, Janaelle?’”

  Well, okay. Janaelle was his sister, and according to Annelise she was the only family member who wasn’t angry with Colton. I dropped the box of doughnuts in the break room. Then, thinking about going back to my office where I would inevitably hear Colton’s half of the conversation, I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a chocolate-covered doughnut out of the box.

  Shot at and missed

  Chapter 11

  Lensky came in while I was working on the doughnut. “Thalia. I want your help.” He glanced around the room. “Should we maybe go to the private side?”

  Where Ingrid was brooding, Colton was dealing with a family fight, and God only knew what Ben was doing; I just hoped it didn’t involve fire. “Right now, I think your office would be more private.” I collected the rest of my doughnut and my coffee mug, and followed him to an office which was larger, lighter, and more sturdily built than anything we’d knocked together on the research side.

  He closed the door and put both our cell phones in a steel drawer before telling me anything. “I need one person in San Antonio, and I’d like it to be you. Extreme discretion is required.”

  “Why, Brad! You never told me you thought I could be extremely discreet!”

  “Only by comparison with your colleagues,” he said, neatly puncturing that little bubble.

  As he outlined the situation, it sounded like something out of one of those spy shows he loved to torture himself by watching. His agency had been tracking the movements of someone they called “Blondie,” who had crossed the border – unconventionally – a week earlier. Blondie was known to be in contact with both Al-Qaeda and Isis, and his field of expertise was explosives. “Large quantities of explosives,” Lensky expatiated. “It’s believed that he got his start as a building demolitions engineer, then he found out he could get paid better for demolishing buildings that were still full of people. We don’t think he’s a jihadi, just a mercenary, and if we can turn him we might be able to stop what looks like a multi-city terrorist plot.”

  The problem was that they’d briefly lost track of Blondie. Now they thought he had resurfaced in a hotel on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. The problem was, there were three men registered at the hotel who fit the profile: registered under unverifiable names, paranoid, demanding a room with a built-in safe.

  “Doesn’t anybody know what he looks like?”

  “Gomez did.”

  “And Gomez…?”

  “Died in the car accident where we lost track of Blondie.” Lensky massaged his forehead and the bridge of his nose with one hand. “We think it was an accident… Oh, forget it. I’ll have Ben do it. Just in case it wasn’t an accident, I don’t want you anywhere near Blondie.”

  He would not have Ben do it; Ben was much too given to improvisation and using untested algorithms to be trusted alone on an assignment like this. But I didn’t argue, trusting Lensky to get to that conclusion on his own.

  “Maybe you could tell me precisely what you want?”

  “A look at whatever’s in those hotel safes. Without alarming Blondie. Whichever one he is. All three of these guys are acting squirrely about letting Housekeeping into their rooms, so we can’t send somebody in that way. And they don’t leave their rooms.”

  “Mmm.” He definitely couldn’t use Ben; Ingrid and I were the only ones who’d been working on telekinesis.

  Lensky’s idea had an elegant simplicity that I liked. Remove papers – or whatever – from the room safes by telekinesis. Look them over quickly, maybe photograph them, and put them back the same way. Unless a target opened his safe in the few minutes when we had the papers, he’d have no reason to suspect anybody had seen them.

  I thought a little more about how to work this.

  “I’d need to be in a comparable hotel room. Ideally, one with the same layout. At a minimum, one with an in-room safe, and maps of the layouts of the targets’ rooms.”

  “We can arrange that,” Lensky said. “Somebody else will see to it that the right kind of room is reserved. All we have to do is drive down there, take up the reservation, get you any other information you need, and then you do your thing.”

  “No longer threatening to use Ben?”

  “I’m not sharing a luxury room in a Riverwalk hotel with Ben. Nor, for that matter, with Ingrid.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  Lensky’s agency is very competent; they got us a suite with the same layout as those rented by our three targets. In fact, we had a water view suite precisely above one target’s suite. Lucky for me the rich aren’t creative; all three targets had gone for the most expensive type of rooms in the hotel, all of which were laid out in the same fashion. I didn’t find the trip tiring at all; Lensky did the driving. The only fly in my ointment was that there was a chilly rain drizzling down, which was a bit more of a water view than his agency had paid for. The Riverwalk lost some of it
s appeal under those conditions. However, we found ways to entertain ourselves adequately indoors.

  By early evening I was showered, dressed in comfortable loose clothing, and prepared to exert my best concentration on behalf of the agency that funded the Center as soon as Lensky’s contact in the kitchens notified us that room service had just delivered to one of the targets.

  What I intended to do was probably not, strictly speaking, telekinesis (though I ought to look up the definition some time to make sure). When somebody said “telekinesis” I thought about Ingrid making a sugar packet hover above the coffee tray and lazily fly to the break room table. Apart from uncertainty about how well it would work against a closed safe door, there were other reasons why we did not wish to use that algorithm. Seeing their private papers floating through the air would upset the targets unnecessarily, and anyway, Lensky hadn’t asked for them to suffer nervous breakdowns. Particularly the two who weren’t Blondie.

  No, for this job I was going to use a neat little inversion and shift of the way we did teleportation. To teleport, we used the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem to establish an identity between the place where we were standing and the place we wanted to be. In this case I wanted to establish an identity between the place where the papers were (in a target’s room safe) and where we wanted them to be (in our own room’s safe). Ingrid and I had fooled around with this in the summer – inspired, I now realized, by some comments of Lensky’s about how useful such a capability would be. Sneaky man. Had he been trying to steer us towards the research his agency was most interested in?

  I put that notion aside for later consideration and set about constructing keys to the visualization I wanted to build. It should look like two graphs at right angles to each other, partially overlapping the basic Brouwer example. It wasn’t easy to keep in my head, and we hadn’t drilled on making this visualization automatic like the simpler teleportation one. So I settled down comfortably on the floor, cross-legged and leaning back against the couch. I selected a handful of stars from those in my pocket and spread out my cheat sheets on the coffee table. Closed my eyes, constructed images of the adjustment graphs in my head, added the Brouwer example and reached down one floor to Target 1’s room. I could sense that space overlapping our own space… whoops, that was too much of a good thing; I didn’t want to be in the same room with one of our targets. I backed out, shook most of the stars off my hand and reached again.