An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  Even though the big brother of Lensky's childhood had long ago turned into the addicted gambler who brought only misery to his family, Lensky had never given up hope that some day, miraculously, 'the real Aleksi' would return.

  Death has a way of crushing those hopes. Lensky was still mourning, not the man Aleksi was, but the man he might have been. It was a wound that hadn't healed in ten years. All that had changed was that he'd grown better at concealing it.

  Showing me the extent of that wound demanded honesty in return. So I told him about growing up lonely.

  How can you be lonely in a big, boisterous Greek family? Very easily, if you're different enough from them, and they don't like what you are.

  Different defined my school years as well. I didn’t have much else besides brains going for me – I wasn’t athletic, or pretty, or talented at anything besides school work. By the time I figured out that my social life might be better if I didn't show my intelligence, I had also worked out that my only hope of going to college was to win scholarships. I couldn't afford to blow off homework or get test answers wrong on purpose in the hope that the cretins in my class would like me better. Not if I was ever going to get away from the cretins in my class.

  By the time I got to the university I was used to being alone. It never even occurred to me to try and make friends, even if I’d known how. I had come to accept my father's evaluation: I was unfeminine, overly intellectual, and socially inept.

  The best thing that ever happened to me: I stumbled across Dr. Verrick's path in the first week of classes. He told me to drop calculus and apply for his Honors Topology course. I did that and discovered a world where I fit in, a world that wanted me to do what I did best, and for nearly four years I never felt the need for anything more. I lived at home because I couldn't afford anything else and my life quickly took on the pattern it was to maintain for three and a half years: Get up. Ignore my father over breakfast. Walk to campus. Go through a golden door to a world where abstract thought was my greatest joy and nobody objected. Walk home at the end of the day. Ignore my father's comments on my appearance (not good) and my chances of marriage (even worse.)

  In the fourth year my life fell apart.

  Rick was newly in the Honors Topology course, a transfer from Princeton. In the second half of that fourth year I started having trouble with some of the theorems we had to prove, and Rick - who hadn't been conditioned like our other classmates by three years of being terrified when I went to the blackboard - asked me out.

  I started noticing and enjoying aspects of life that had been invisible to me before. Beer. Parties. Music. Sex. I know now that sex with Rick was not all that great and that it wasn't my fault, but at the time - you know, your first boyfriend, you think he invented sex.

  The distractions didn't improve my performance in class. Neither did the vast decrease of time available to think about mathematics. I was already short on study time because in this last year, a couple of my scholarships had run out and I was tutoring to pick up the slack. Now I lost even more hours going to parties with Rick, drinking beer with Rick, and not getting enough sleep with Rick.

  Dr. Verrick started introducing problems in N-dimensional spaces and my performance cratered. I had no intuition for multiple dimensions and I didn't know how to solve problems that I couldn't "see" inside my head. Rick "comforted" me by saying that I could always take some education courses and get a job teaching grade school. Rick was all over me in those dark days, and I felt as though his love was all I'd salvaged from the wreck of my life. Then I started doing something that looked a hell of a lot like magic whenever I did concentrate on math, and Rick bailed on me, saying this stuff was too weird for him.

  "He didn't love you," Lensky said. "He never loved you. He enjoyed your downfall. When he was pretending to comfort you he was really just rubbing it in. He liked seeing you hurting and defeated, and when you found a new way forward he ran away because he couldn't stand seeing you succeed."

  "Maybe." I still had trouble thinking straight about the chaos of loss and failure and confusion that I had, God knows how, lived through less than a year and a half ago. "There was this party. Not close to campus. Somebody's parents' house on Cat Mountain. A couple of days before the party I'd shown Rick how I could move little things without touching them by thinking about the Axiom of Choice and he said it was too weird and crazy for him to wrap his head around, but I didn't think - I mean, I found it disturbing too. And we were already going to this party, I mean on the way, he'd pulled over for - something else - and he said it had just been some kind of illusion, what I'd done before. So I showed him again, right there, and asked him how he thought I'd been able to rig mirrors and invisible wires in his car, and - I shouldn't have done that but I was freaked out, I badly wanted someone to talk to, and I could - I thought I could trust Rick."

  "Then after we got to the party he... disappeared. For a while. I'm not sure how long. I was... drinking too much. I usually did when we went out; it made it easier to relax when... if I went home with him." I studied my nails. "Only, that night, he left early, and he took Cyndi Simmons with him."

  "Leaving you stranded?"

  I nodded. "So, naturally, I drank more, because being shit-faced is so much help with these little contretemps. Ben found me throwing up and crying in a bathroom. He told me I'd had enough and he was taking me home right then."

  "He didn't have a date?"

  I almost smiled. "Cyndi Simmons."

  "So you two deserted lovers consoled yourselves." Lensky's voice had an edge to it.

  I shook my head. "Not - what you're thinking. He did take me back to his place, but that was only because he'd met my parents and could guess that being out all night would get me in less trouble than being brought home drunk out of my mind. I could always claim I'd stayed over with a girlfriend. So... I passed out on his bed and he slept on the couch. When I woke up the next day he gave me coffee and aspirin."

  I hugged my knees, remembering the lost waif I'd been on that morning. "And when I showed him the Axiom of Choice thing, he didn't run away. He said, "How did you do that?" and started trying to do it himself. We spent the rest of the weekend making up sets of buttons and crackers and twists of paper and matches - anything that was little and light - and, and selecting from them. Without touching anything."

  I turned so that I could see Lensky. "I hope you can understand. Yes, that's something I share with Ben that I can't share with you. But there's nothing remotely sexual about it."

  "I want more from you than sex," Lensky said.

  I leaned my head on his knees. "I know. I'm not good at relationships but - I want this between us to be more than sex. Only I don't know what I have to give. I'm not entirely a real person, you know, so I may fail at some of the nuances. But I need you to understand: Ben is my friend. That's not going to change."

  Lensky rumpled my hair. "I wouldn't ask that of you. One of the things I love about you is your insane loyalty. One of the things you may not care for about me, I'm afraid, is my tendency to jealousy. I'm afraid it's built in. You know the Agency’s attitude to slight paranoia.”

  I nodded. “A feature, not a bug. Don’t worry; we can work around that.”

  “Sexist, racist, KKK”

  Chapter 13

  For the next few days Lensky used Southwest Airlines like a high-altitude extension of Uber, dashing all over Texas and New Mexico to follow up leads developed from Blondie’s notes. He wasn’t supposed to tell me exactly what he was doing, but I got the impression that the notes, plus Blondie’s readiness to pull a gun, had caused the agency to reclassify him from “nonideological mercenary,” to “ideological terrorist.” The language of the notes plus the ties to Al-Qaeda gave a strong hint as to what ideology was informing Blondie’s activities, but that got into the realm of things it wasn’t politically acceptable to say. For the record, Lensky said in a rare moment of exasperated openness, they had to treat the investigation into Blondie as though
it was perfectly possible he was swayed by the Seventh Day Adventists.

  Notorious bomb-throwing terrorists that they were.

  I didn’t miss him too much, because we were pretty busy doing actual research at the Center.

  The speech that BFiN planned to shut down was coming up soon. All four research fellows agreed that it would be a good thing to thwart BFiN, even Ingrid who was almost equally outraged by the topic of the speech. “Is Hate Speech Free Speech?” she quoted. “What nonsense! I despise anybody who tries to twist the Constitution around to protect Nazis. Do you really think someone who wants to put people into concentration camps should be granted free speech?”

  “I don’t think freedom of speech is something that’s ‘granted,’” Ben said. “It’s a right. One I’d like us to keep – even if we don’t like what someone has to say. Do you think somebody in a black mask, waving a stick, should be the ultimate arbiter of our rights?”

  Ingrid sighed and agreed that no, she didn’t want BFiN to have the last word on the issue of rights. Her lips were almost permanently pursed in disapproval, but she sat in on the planning sessions.

  The best result, of course, would be to have University or law enforcement authorities stop the mob. Dr. Verrick told us that he had raised the subject with the Chancellor and had gotten the expectable mealy-mouthed blabber: BFiN members had rights too, feelings understandably exacerbated, not the University’s place to silence spirited debate.

  Lensky had warned the mayor and the chief of police that there was likely to be a very nasty riot on the date of the speech. If they’d paid any attention to his warning, we saw no signs of it.

  I had some doubts as to whether four topologists, with or without minor paranormal capabilities, were really up to stopping a mob than no one in authority was willing to tackle. But after infiltrating that meeting I really, really wanted to do something to interfere with BFiN’s plans.

  So I codified the very best protective shield algorithms that Ben and I could put together and we all practiced raising shields on the key-word “Manifold,” until we could do it alone, jointly, in a quiet office, or while being yelled at by Annelise and Jimmy (drafted to play “mob”). If I’d trained like that before San Antonio, I could have shielded Lensky and me from Blondie’s gun without taking the drastic step of teleporting seventy miles.

  Not that I was sure shielding would have been a better solution. For one thing, Lensky had had his weapon in his hand before I even started the jump. If I’d raised the shield instead… what happened to objects exiting the shield with high kinetic energy? Ben and I did some experiments with a softball and the results were not encouraging. A bullet released within the shield would probably ricochet around inside the shield for God knew how long. As Ben said, “Even when you throw the ball, Lia, it bounces all over the inside of your shield forever. And nobody throws worse than you do.”

  Then we did some experimenting on how far we could extend the shields. (Remember what I told you: no matter how you deform a sphere, mere changes in shape don’t count. A sphere that has been curved and flattened until it looks like a very fat letter “C” is still a sphere. Topologically speaking.)

  “If I minimize depth and concentrate on width,” Colton reported, “I can hold a shield that goes about as far as halfway across the front of the Student Union.”

  “How many stars does that involve?” (Not a rating system; I was referring to the Lights of the Medes, whose power strengthened the shields beautifully.)

  “Not,” Colton said sadly, “a finite number. It takes a constant flow of stars into the shield to maintain it. At least, for me it does.”

  Given that each of us had an infinite set of stars, constant flow wasn’t going to be a problem. But it did mean that we couldn’t apply more stars to the shield and extend it even farther.

  And there was no way that four such shields would protect the entire building. We went out and paced over the ground and decided that the best we could do was to figure out which way the mob was headed, get there first, and line up four overlapping shields between them and the doors. This plan had the advantage that since we weren’t straining to maximize the width, we could put some more depth into each shield. I liked the idea of having a couple feet of “dead” air between me and some black-masked thug with a stick or bike lock.

  “What about the hairspray flamethrowers?” Ingrid asked.

  We went back to the whiteboards, added a heat-dispersal algorithm, and then rehearsed with the improved shields until we were back to being able to throw them up automatically and deform them with hand gestures. Moved into the private side, just in case, and had Annelise and Jimmy attack us with chairs, pointers, and the softball.

  “The couple of feet of space in front is a good idea,” Jimmy said afterwards. “I found it incredibly frustrating to have you guys right in front of me and not even get close to you with the pointer I was swinging. And I didn’t even really want to hurt you!”

  “Could have fooled me,” Ingrid sniffed. She’d been just a tad slow to raise her shield on the last rehearsal, and Jimmy had nearly beaned her with the softball.

  I was proud of Jimmy. His ears turned red, but he did not apologize.

  When Meadow and Mr. M. returned from their extended lab work, we drafted Meadow to augment the roster of fake attackers. The other two members of the “mob” were getting tired and not being as hateful and vicious as they should, and a girl with the personality of a small bulldozer was a good addition to the mix.

  Mr. M watched our rehearsals but had little to say. He seemed to think the whole thing was a waste of time. “Why try to block a mob?” he asked. “It is much easier simply to disperse them.”

  “Sir, I’d be happy to incorporate any crowd-control algorithms you happen to know,” Colton said. He had really come a long way with respect to Mr. M. While Lensky still called him, “that turtle-snake robot pet,” Colton treated him exactly like any other valued Center member. Since Colton was naturally polite to everybody, this suited Mr. M. perfectly.

  Mr. M. smirked. “You would not be able to implement them. It is not possible to compensate for all your mortal limitations.” In Mr. M.’s world, politeness only went one direction.

  He turned his smirk on Meadow and waved his tail at her.

  “Augmentation?” murmured Ben.

  “Yes, but what? I don’t see anything new about his body.”

  “Which is kind of a relief. At least he hasn’t got machine-gun turrets. Yet.”

  We didn’t get anything but smirks and grins out of Meadow until the day of the speech.

  On the last evening that Lensky was home, I had a long, detailed discussion with him about shields, with particular emphasis on the ricochet issue. He was supposed to be in Houston interviewing some oil company executives who’d recently returned from a hot spot in the Middle East for the next two days, so he wouldn’t be back until late on the day of the speech. But even though he wouldn’t be involved this time, the softball experiments had made me super-aware of the dangers in firing a weapon inside a shielded space and I wanted to be sure that he shared that awareness.

  “By the way,” Ingrid said on the morning of the speech, “who’s the speaker?”

  I shrugged. “Some law professor with a popular conservative blog, is what I heard. It’s probably on the posters; look around outside.”

  “I did.”

  Ingrid told us that the Young Republicans’ posters advertising the speech had all been defaced or torn down. However, anybody who wanted to know the time, topic and venue only needed to look at one of the BFiN posters spattered across the mall and over the front of the Student Union. So we knew that it was happening this afternoon in the Student Union and that BFiN planned to assemble and lead a protest march up the South Mall from Littlefield Fountain to the Tower and then west to the Student Union. But the speaker was not named and BFiN described the subject as, “A Defense of Hate Speech,” which I thought was not totally accurate. That desc
ription almost lost us Ingrid’s participation – again. She didn’t get totally with the program until Ben suggested that if the speech were allowed to proceed as planned, she could attend and tear the speaker to shreds – verbally – during the questions afterwards. Whereas if BFiN succeeded in getting it cancelled, nobody’s opinion would change one way or the other.

  With the prospect of exercising her razor-sharp brain on the unfortunate law professor who was to give the speech, Ingrid became totally enthusiastic about our attempt to thwart, or at least to slow down, BFiN.

  We decided to station ourselves at right angles, two facing south and two facing west, in front of the Union. We’d stand about five to eight feet apart – close enough for a good overlap of shields. Of course the protestors could easily split and go around us; we couldn’t really stop them if they were determined to get into the building. We hoped, though, that this wouldn’t be part of their plan. Actually being in the building, especially in an all-black outfit, would make it hard to melt out of view if the police started arresting people. We figured they would focus on being as intimidating as possible while milling around the West Mall.

  I’m used to things going wrong with our plans to apply topology in the real world. But I hadn’t expected them to start going wrong before we even set out, which is what happened now.

  First, Mr. M. declined to attend in his usual position (wrapped around my waist).

  “Fine,” I said. “I worry about you getting stepped on. Why don’t you just take a nap here while we’re out?”

  He raised up his front twelve inches and did his cobra sway—now with special effects. Apparently Meadow’s latest augmentation had been the retractable hood he’d been demanding; it looked more like a tiny satellite dish than like a cobra’s hood, but it did add a certain gravitas to his swaying motion. “I have no intention of leaving this to you children. I shall attend, but la señorita Melendez will carry me. It is important that I remain outside the field of influence of your shields.”