An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  “That’s not a good idea, Mr. M. What if somebody steps on you?”

  “We’ve got it all worked out,” Meadow said. “I’m going to stand on the top step, with Mr. M. on my shoulders. That way we’ll be protected by your shields without being actually within them.”

  “What if somebody throws something?”

  Meadow snorted. “That bunch? Lia, even you throw better than those [expletive] useless [profanity] idiots.”

  It seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, but one seldom won arguments with Mr. M. Or with Meadow Melendez, for that matter. Anyway, it was almost time for the march to begin – and a new problem came bounding up the stairs just then.

  Two at a time, as usual.

  “My last asset to interview in Houston was a no-show,” Lensky announced, and swept me into his arms for an exuberant kiss.

  The exuberance damped down quickly when he found out our plans. However, his attempts to put his foot down also faded rather quickly.

  “Absolutely not! I’m not having all of you put yourselves in danger.”

  None of us took that well.

  His response to our resistance was, “Didn’t you hear me? I forbid it.”

  After vocal opposition and a pointed reminder that Dr. Verrick was the boss, he backed down to, “All right, the rest of you can go risk your necks, but Thalia’s staying right here.”

  And finally, “Thalia, you’re not going anywhere without me.”

  He was able to make the last one stick. Actually, I wasn’t too unhappy about having his company. An armed man seemed like an excellent accessory for this little excursion.

  Outdoors we found a cloudy sky and a very welcome cool breeze.

  “Cold front so soon?” Ingrid said, eyebrows raised.

  “Middle of October? Not that all soon.” Colton said. “Back in the Panhandle around this time, folks start reminding each other that there’s nothing between us and Canada but a couple of barbed wire fences. But this could be useful.”

  “Well, it’s more comfortable…”

  “Betcha BFiN don’t like rain,” said Colton cheerfully. “We get a good strong rainstorm, the precious little snowflakes will just melt away.”

  Ben sputtered. “Pun intentional?”

  “Always.”

  For the first half hour after we reached our positions, it was possible to hope that the protest march had sputtered out from the mere possibility of rain. The skies had gone from a soft gray to threatening, roiling black clouds and the temperature had dropped another ten degrees since we came outside. Cold front, definitely. Rain, probably.

  Then we heard them coming up from the South Mall. An angry, rhythmic chant that sounded like a cloud of bees grew louder and clearer by the minute. “Charles Murray, go away! Sexist, racist, KKK! Charles Murray, go away! Sexist, racist, KKK!”

  “Is Charles Murray a lawyer?” I called to Ben. “I thought he was a writer. He wrote that book Coming Apart, right?”

  “Right,” Ben called back. “He’s also not the speaker.”

  “So why are they chanting about this Murray guy?”

  His smile was pure evil… in a beautiful sort of way. “It’s just possible that some computer hacker type changed the name of the speaker in their files.”

  “Jimmy?”

  Ben put on an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Now, how would I know what Jimmy’s been up to?”

  I’d persuaded Jimmy to stay out of the confrontation by reminding him that he’d only be another person for us to shield, and anyway, he’d promised to stop being Ingrid’s doormat. But it seemed that he’d already made his contribution.

  Then, with a jogging rush from the Tower, they were filling up the West Mall. “Manifold!” I shouted, and four shields went up with beautiful symmetry just as the first wave of protestors reached us. The new, improved shields were crystal-clear, so I could see the expressions on their faces. Snarling anger and a kind of exultation rapidly faded into shock and frustration as they hurled sticks, bricks, and themselves at a barricade they could neither see nor feel.

  The shields worked beautifully to absorb and return the kinetic energy of individual missiles. They weren’t quite so good with masses of people hurling themselves forward. Inside my shield, Lensky and I got bumped around and nearly lost our footing a couple of times. A couple of glances to left and right told me that my colleagues were having the same experience. A glance at the sky told me less than nothing; there might be a rainstorm to save us in the next few minutes, or there might not.

  Looking at all those hateful, screaming faces was unnerving. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that they would happily beat us up and stamp on us if the shields went down. Beside me, Lensky was tense as a taut wire; I could feel it in the arm that encircled me. He had drawn his weapon. Of course he had drawn his weapon. “Remember, don’t shoot inside the shield!” I reminded him.

  “Right. Let me know if the shield fails.”

  I didn’t think he’d need a formal notification. I just hoped he would have time to shoot between the moment of failure and the moment when we got trampled underfoot. “You do have the safety on, right?”

  “Thalia, it’s a Glock. There isn’t a safety.”

  That was more than I’d really wanted to know about firearms.

  I closed my eyes to check on the feed of stars into the shield. That was all right, still going smooth and strong. An infinite number of stars – they could keep going forever.

  But we had a finite number of topologists, and we couldn’t keep going forever. This had been an exceptionally bad idea; we weren’t going to get out of this, were we?

  “If we survive,” I said to Lensky, “remind me never, ever to make up a plan without an escape strategy.”

  “Can you teleport us out?”

  It would be tricky. I’d have to stop visualizing Manifold before I could invoke Brouwer. Lensky might be able to hold the mob off for that second or two. But what would my colleagues do? I couldn’t shout the strategy to them, the yelling of the mob drowned us all out. And they didn’t have armed escorts for the transition.

  Directly in front of me, a man yanked off the black bandanna covering his face and vomited on the shield, then staggered away to my left. Oh, ick. Thank goodness the shield seemed to consider projectile vomiting a kinetic assault. Ben and I certainly hadn’t specified that.

  Now there were more people looking wobbly. The whole seething mass of protestors was thinning out as more and more of them threw up or just backed away. “Poison gas!” I heard someone yell.

  Oh… I hoped not. We hadn’t had time to develop a shield that would discriminate between good air and bad air. But I certainly wasn’t feeling sick, and Lensky wasn’t even remotely wobbly. The protestors, on the other hand, were having a really bad afternoon.

  Totally confused, I watched through the shield as black-clad bodies staggered, collapsed, crawled away. Within minutes the West Mall was littered with discarded signs on sticks. Nobody was chanting, nobody was shrieking… nobody was even there.

  I decided to drop my shield, but to be ready to teleport out of there if anybody so much as waved a hostile finger at us.

  Ingrid was next to drop shields. “If we’re through here, I want to go listen to the talk.”

  I blinked at her. “The speaker’s here?”

  “Didn’t you see him? They brought him around from Guadalupe and went behind us.”

  “My attention was otherwise occupied. Uh, sure, go listen to the talk. Let me know what happens.”

  “What? You went to all this trouble to make sure the man could speak and you don’t care what he’s going to say?”

  “Right. Exactly. Got it.” I loathe political debates, even when I’m not teetering on the ragged edge of exhaustion. It’s just that the only thing I loathe more is shouting people down without giving them a chance to be heard. It was, after all, the tactic my father had used on me until I learned to ignore him and walk away.

  And I was
much too tired to try and explain that to Ingrid. I looked around at the rest of our merry band. Ben looked almost as tired as I felt. Colton, by contrast, looked positively energetic; either he’d been exercising Manifold more efficiently than the rest of us, or the prospect of a fistfight with a couple of hundred protestors was just what made for an interesting evening down on the farm.

  And Mr. M. was smirking.

  So was Meadow.

  I dragged myself over to them. “All right, guys. What did you do?”

  “La señorita muy hermosa implemented my new augmentation,” Mr. M. said, curling smugly around Meadow’s neck and resting his head on her ample bosom. “It has been a long time since I routed the foe so gloriously.”

  “I can’t believe a cobra hood intimidated those jerks into running away.”

  Meadow cleared her throat. “Actually, it’s not so much a hood as a… a sort of sonic transmitter and magnifier. The real augmentation is internal.”

  “I drove off the enemy with charms and cantrips to cause discomfort, worry, fear and nausea,” Mr. M. said.

  “Focused ultrasonic beams,” Meadow translated.

  The next Ice Age

  Chapter 14

  Lensky and I went back to his place with Mr.M., who was ready for another long nap. After, of course, a stop at the doughnut shop. Maintaining a shield wasn’t nearly as draining as teleporting, but being terrified had its own effect on my blood sugar. Still, Lensky seemed to be even more shaken up than I was. He certainly went through his share of sour cream glazed doughnuts after we got home.

  After rinsing the sugar off his fingertips, he clicked the remote and pulled me down beside him on the couch facing the TV.

  “Planning to watch a nice spy drama to calm yourself down?” I kicked my sandals off so I could sit crosslegged on the oversized sofa cushions.

  “Local news,” he said. “Wondering what they made of all this.”

  What made it to the news was, as you might expect, not much like what had really happened. The story was headlined as, “Conservative activists clash with liberals over freedom of speech,” and there were no shots of the black-clad BFiN mob in action. What they did have was an interview with the ringlet-adorned guy I’d seen at the BFiN meeting, and either he was making more sense now or the interview had been artistically cut to remove some of the craziness. He actually came across as almost calm and reasonable – if you didn’t listen to the words. I thought his mantra of “Hate speech is violence,” was a stupid way of justifying the actual violence he’d been promoting, but the interviewer treated him as though this was an actual, reasonable argument and that in itself gave him unearned credibility.

  Then I sat up in surprise as the talking head on TV said something about “a balanced view,” and they broadcast a picture of Dr. Verrick in his office. His accessible office, that is – the one in the math building. Someone was asking him how he justified his Center researchers’ attacks on protestors.

  “That’s not what happened!”

  “Shut up,” Lensky said, “I want to hear what they say.”

  The unseen interviewer was now asking Dr. Verrick why the Center staff was not more diverse. It wasn’t a line of questioning which inspired him to tactful evasions.

  “I hire whoever can do the work,” he snarled. “If you want a black lesbian dwarf on the staff, feel free to encourage her to apply. Him. Them. Xer. Whatever. I don’t care about pronouns, I just want people who can think intelligently about topology.”

  “And there you have it,” the interviewer said, cutting off whatever else Dr. Verrick might have said, “a divisive clash between student protestors alarmed by hate speech on their campus, and the representatives of an Center whose director evidently does not believe that diverse applicants are qualified to work there.”

  “And that’s not what he said!” I shouted at the screen.

  “You should watch more TV,” Lensky said, “you’d get used to the way they lie. I wonder how they got on to Verrick so quickly? Anyway, relax. It could have been worse.”

  “How?”

  “Pictures of your turtle-snake in action? Pictures of me? The agency really doesn’t like us getting on television. Nobody’s going to care what your ancient professor thinks, but I could have got in real trouble.”

  “You didn’t have to come with us.”

  “Yes, I did. Given that you were hell-bent on putting yourself out there. I just wish….”

  “What?”

  "I wish you'd act more like a real mathematician."

  That really wasn’t a good way of putting it, not if he wanted my cooperation. "You sound like Ingrid. I am a real mathematician." Although I didn't have the Ph.D. stamp on my forehead and probably never would.

  "I mean," he amplified, "sitting in your office. Not doing anything more violent than crumpling up papers and throwing them in the wastebasket. Avoiding interaction - except, of course, with me."

  OK, by that definition I was wildly off the charts. But even if it didn’t count in Ingrid Thorn’s rigid mind, I was doing real research. Original research. Nobody in the math department had ever defined anything like the structure I built in my mind when I wanted a shield around me - or, in this case, around me and Lensky.

  That, I realized tardily, was probably what was bothering him. In some ways Lensky has a very Old Country, traditional view of relations between the sexes. It bothered him - a lot - when I was in danger and he wasn't right there to protect me; we'd had several loud discussions on that subject last spring. He refused to understand that sometimes life just happened at you so fast that there wasn't any time to call in the reserves, or call out the cavalry, or whatever.

  He was probably, irrationally, twice as bothered by the fact that this time it hadn't been him protecting me with his muscle and his weapon; it had been me protecting him with my sidewise mathematical talent that extended into the real world in ways we hadn't entirely figured out yet.

  Well, me with the shield algorithm, and Mr. M. with his new augmentation. But Lensky, who persisted in referring to Mr. M. as "that turtle-snake robot thing," wouldn't be any happier about that part of it.

  I decided to ignore the "real mathematician" crack and try to defuse things with calm rationality. "You went to some trouble to get me to sneak into a BFiN meeting and find out their plans. What they wanted to do outraged all of us. Did you really think we'd leave it at that?"

  "You should have! There are channels to address these issues."

  "Oh?” I jumped up; I was too mad to sit still. “And what channels would those be? The Chancellor? The Mayor? The Chief of Police? All of whom were notified in advance, and none of whom did anything about it?" So much for the calm rationality thing.

  "Just because they didn't do their jobs is no excuse for you to leap into the breach single-handed, dammit!" Lensky's face was turning red and that little vein on his left temple was popping out again. He stood up too. It was really unfair, the way he could tower over me. I bet he wouldn’t have come across so overbearing if he’d been yelling at somebody he had to look up at, like Ingrid.

  "Well, it happens I didn't! If you'd bothered to look, you might have noticed it wasn't just me out in front of the building; it was me and Ben and Ingrid and Colton - not to mention Mr. M!"

  "I might have known you'd bring up your serpentine pet!"

  "Well, he was more help than anybody else! He actually got rid of the mob, or did you fail to notice that too?"

  "I could have dealt with them!"

  "Oh, sure! One man with a gun versus a couple of hundred guys with sticks and bike locks? Either you've been watching too many John Wayne movies, or you're delusional! Or both!"

  Now the veins on both sides of his head were twitching. I'd never seen that before. Looking at them distracted me for the crucial second when his style of argument changed from verbal to physical.

  "Don't you dare shake me!" I yelled when his hands clamped down on my shoulders.

  "Shake you, hell!
I ought to turn you over my knee and smack your bottom!"

  "You even think about that and you can say goodbye to any chance of getting laid in the foreseeable future! In fact, from your perspective the next Ice Age is starting right now!"

  He drew me in close to him. I resisted, but it was really no contest. So there I was with my face mashed up against his shirt front, awash in pheromones, and trying to remember why I was so mad at him.

  I could only hope that proximity was having the same effect on him that it was on me.

  He shifted his grip, wrapping his arms around my waist and holding me even closer. Buried his face in my hair. "Now let's see," he said when he came up for air, "where were we?"

  He'd trapped my hands between us, so as soon as he relaxed his grip enough to allow me to breathe, I regained limited use of them. I unbuttoned the portion of his shirt that was under my fingertips. "You were threatening me with physical violence, and I was logically and reasonably explaining the probable consequences of such a course of action." I slipped one hand inside his shirt and reached around to run my palm over his shoulder and back. Excellent delta and trapezoid muscles - something like that, anyway. A lot of anatomical terms aren't real words and I can't be expected to remember them.

  "Oh, yeah, now I remember. Dire meteorological predictions." One of his hands moved downward, cupping my butt and drawing me even closer against him. Sure felt like at least one portion of his anatomy wasn't concerned about any coming Ice Age.

  Neither was I, any more.

  "I should beat you," he murmured into my hair, "but every time I get my hands on you I get distracted."

  Well, vive la distraction!

  “I think you’ll agree that Verrick has to go.”

  “That’s University business, but yes… we can’t keep somebody like that around. I just have to find a replacement.”

  “To teach his classes?”

  “No, we’ll have to cancel those. Nobody else can teach them. Why do you think I’ve put up with him all these years? I’ve been trying to oust him on the grounds that he’s too old to teach, but it hasn’t worked yet. But this scandal should do the trick. His students will just have to find another topologist to work with. And I’ll have to find somebody to run his little Center.”