The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Preston no, baby – she’s dead. Just leave her be.”

  “But she can’t get to Heaven if she’s buried in the ground! She can’t get out!” His hands never stopped gouging at the earth and I was really alarmed now – I could smell the week-old contents of the grave.

  “She’s not going to Heaven, she’s just dead,” I snapped.

  For a moment his eyes seemed to glow like lamps. “But Grandma said!”

  I could see fur in the bottom of the hole. His filthy fingers scrabbled about, tugging at the loose hairy skin.

  “Grandma’s talking horseshit,” I snapped. Okay, so I lost my temper. It was the horrible memory of Pop’s funeral, where the preacher and Mom conspired to tell me I shouldn’t be mourning, that he had gone to a better place, that if I cried then I would make God angry. “There’s no Heaven. We all die and we rot and that’s it, we don’t go anywhere, we don’t do or think anything – she’s gone Preston, STOP THAT NOW!”

  He lunged forward at me, snarling. I grabbed him, dropping the flashlight. He was wiry as a lynx and much stronger than I'd expected, and I was shocked as I felt his teeth close on my arm, tearing my sleeve. Not shocked enough to drop him, though. There are ways you learn of subduing people and as we struggled I got his neck in a pinch that overwhelmed his nerves with so much pain that he went limp and all but stopped breathing. I grabbed him up, half carrying him on my hip, and hauled back indoors. Dumping him on his bed, I tried to cuddle him, but Mom was standing at the room door demanding “What’s wrong? What’s he done?” and Preston was starting to thrash his legs, so I rolled him tight in the blanket, pushed her out of the room and locked the door.

  “Don’t let him out!” I ordered.

  Then I went back down into the yard and built a big bonfire there. Once it was roaring I dug Lady up, flipped the fetid sodden mass of her onto a black plastic sack, dragged it to the pyre and stood over it until I'd burned everything to good clean ashes.

  When I turned round at last, and my eyes adjusted to the night, I saw Preston crouched on the roof watching me. He'd climbed out of his bedroom window.

  His howl was wordless and guttural.

  *

  After that, things began to change. They'd already been changing for a while I guess, but I had to acknowledge them now. Preston was growing, but this wasn’t some kid thing. At nine, ridiculously early, he was hitting puberty. And hitting it hard. I watched over the following months as he put on bulk around the shoulders and neck – wiry still, but getting much stronger. His face was changing too, his delicate little-boy features swallowed up in new masses of bone as his brows beetled over his eyes and his jaws rushed to catch up with the dentition that replaced the last of his sweet baby teeth. He seemed self-conscious of his new height because he started to walk with a slouching stoop and turn his face away from me, answering my conversation with more grunts than words.

  So far, so normal, right? He did all the usual boy stuff, which didn’t bother me because I’d lived with army men and they aren’t sugar and spice. And everyone knows that teenaged boys stink. Within the year I couldn’t bear to walk past the open door of his bedroom. I nagged him daily into bathing, but it never seemed to make much difference.

  He stopped wearing shoes. Plagued from infancy with corns and calluses that made wearing anything but trainers uncomfortable, his feet started to look twisted and lumpen, and his toenails were disgustingly yellow and horny. I thought about taking him to a podiatrist, but had to admit that he seemed to manage alright once his calluses toughened. He moved with a weird, limping gait, but boy could he go fast – even over the roughest ground.

  He stopped eating anything but raw meat. And he insisted on storing it until it was grey and greasy.

  He didn’t grow a beard. Instead his light blond fluff all fell out, leaving him bald. I wept.

  By ten, he looked like a fourteen year old skinhead. He acted like a teenager too – grouchy, secretive and inarticulate. I figured he'd come out the other side just fine if I kept my cool and didn’t pick any more fights. Wasn’t it just a matter of time? The petty dramas and agonies of my own adolescent years were memories that clung to this house, still fresh, and I'd be damned if I tried to control my son the way mom had tried to crush the rebellion out of me. Fuck that shit.

  Mom was changing too. She lost muscle as Preston gained it, like he was eating her somehow. Her arms and legs shrank to sticks, though her belly still sagged from the cradle of her hips.

  Eventually I took her to the hospital. Tests revealed she had stomach cancer, which her meagre insurance wouldn’t touch. I drove her home.

  That was my life, for a period that seemed like forever at the time but looks terribly short now when I glance back. I worked shifts to feed my surly introverted son and buy painkillers through the internet for my dying mother. I delegated Preston to look after the house, but he was useless at most tasks, like any teenager, and I had to quit my job in the end to give Mom her personal care round the clock.

  Poor Preston. Too young to drive, no friends in the neighbourhood, no money, no girls to meet, no dad to take him hunting the way fathers in the area were supposed to. It’s not much of a life for a boy, stuck in a house with a dying woman and a mom too busy and too tired to pay him any attention.

  And then one night his grandma died. I was there, half-dozing despite my tears and my anxiety. Death can be so very boring and so very long, sometimes. I'd seen plenty of the other kind of course – and honest, I don’t know which is worse. Whichever hurts the most as you go, I guess.

  I think I'd rather bite a bullet, myself, than fight cancer they way my parents did.

  She died late one night when the summer bugs were banging against the windows and the owls were calling. When it was all over I tucked her under the counterpane and came downstairs to the kitchen, poured myself a large glass of Jack and sat down at the table. A few tears leaked out. I knew I should ring the doctor but it was the middle of the night and my head was swimming with exhaustion. The thought of letting anyone into our home right now seemed unbearable. The house was silent, and I wished Lady was there to lean against my leg and nose at my hand.

  I'd get a new dog now, I decided. I put my head down on the scratched Formica and let it all just wash over me.

  What woke me up, hours later, was a bumping from the ceiling overhead. That house is pretty creaky – you can always tell if someone else is moving round in a room upstairs. I looked up, bleary eyed, and worked out that I was directly under Mom’s bedroom. I could hear her headboard rattling.

  Preston.

  He'd gone into her room and I could hear him.

  Shit no. Not my mom!

  I was up those stairs and in the doorway in moments. Maybe he didn’t hear me coming, maybe he was just too engrossed to care. It wasn’t precisely the scene I was expecting to see.

  I screamed. Preston uttered one wordless snarl, then hit the window at full pelt and burst through it out into the night.

  Now here I sit, in the kitchen, nursing my whiskey and trying to ignore the smell seeping down through the ceiling. I still haven’t called the doctor. I'm really not sure how I'm going to manage the situation this time. I need to think things through.

  I wish I could get the picture of Mom’s thin bare leg, her foot waving grotesquely in the air, out of my head.

  I've not seen my son since that night. But I am looking forward to the arrival of my grandchild any day now.

  Irrational Numbers by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Numbers have always been friends to me.

  When I look at numbers, I see familiar faces, well-known associates of predictable behaviour that I can – excuse the pun – count on. I understand them, and they do what they can to oblige me.

  I could never have been anything other than a mathematician. Pure mathematics, the highest and most true realm of thought, that’s where the beauty and the wonder is. That’s where the code of the universe is acted out by the numbers I grew to know whe
n I was still a child: my friends, my playmates, my companions.

  I have never had the same facility with people. People do not do what I want, nor have I ever been able to rely on them. They are unpredictable and difficult to work with. Not like my numbers.

  And I know now that there is nothing but numbers.

  Mathematics is competitive. There are some answers out there that are like a … “holy grail” is the cliché usually trotted out. It’s a poor simile, holding up mouldy old superstition as a substitute for the ultimate truths. The greatest minds have devoted their whole lives to demonstrating the proofs of certain things such as Yang-Mills theory or the P vs. NP problem – that every problem with a solution a computer can easily verify can also be easily solved. Little things, of interest only to mathematicians, except they would transform the world just as we transform our numbers.

  Numbers can do more than people. Numbers can merge and combine, split and divide. Numbers can act on others in precise and remarkable ways. What we mathematicians can do with our friends the numbers bears as much relation to the algebra you learned in high school as a star to a guttering candle.

  Which brings us to the Rigolo Transformation.

  I am Rigolo; Doctor Anne Rigolo of the Faculty of Pure Mathematics at Hart Gilman College, Providence, and the operation to which I gave my name was my greatest triumph and, shortly after, my most dismal disgrace. And now may be something else.

  Just what it may be, I cannot say. I would say it might be one more cruel prank from my colleagues, but I saw Schochtauer’s body. I saw the expression on his face. Fear, yes, but fear because he was confronted by something he had opened his mind to understand, and failed. I’ve seen that look on my students’ faces every time I try to teach them the true beauty of numbers. Schochtauer didn’t love the numbers enough. That was all. Schochtauer underwent one of the limited set of transformations a human life is capable of.

  Soon it will be my turn, and I will take refuge in my numbers and I will live. Because all the universe is numbers. There is nothing that cannot be described and commanded if you understand the numbers well enough.

  *

  I had been working on the same great mathematical problems as all the rest. Everyone at the top of our profession tried: some just once, so they could say they had put a toe in the water; others with a consuming obsession. I was of the latter camp.

  And then I had a dream. In my dreams, numbers speak with me and try to explain how I can make use of them. All too often I cannot understand them, and I wake disappointed with the limits of my subconscious. But this night they spoke to me in words like crystal chimes and flutes, and showed me how they slipped from one dimension to the next, and when I woke, I knew.

  I did not go to work that day. I stayed at home with the phone turned off and wrote and wrote, covering every piece of blank paper I could find with my equations. They blazed in my mind, each one leading to the next. I scrawled them until my hand cramped, and then I wrote with my left. I had stumbled onto a new way of dealing with numbers, a way of twisting them through ninety degrees into a wholly unsuspected space. The Rigolo Transformation. It would be the greatest mathematical discovery in the world for just short of two weeks.

  Simply transform an existing set of numbers into the hypothetical Rigolo space that I was constructing, and the gloves were off. Suddenly, the logical limits that had frustrated decades of mathematical proofs could be circumvented. I can still remember my tears dotting the original handwritten sheets because the equations were so beautiful: deeply true and satisfactory in a way even regular numbers were not.

  And that is another thing Schochtauer never understood. He just thought they were something to use. He did not see that they were there to be loved and worshipped, as perfection should always be worshipped. And that is why his fate will not be mine.

  But I must focus. There is movement in the next room. I can hear the metal of their tools clatter and scrape. I can hear their voices.

  At first I thought the Rigolo Transformation was just some oddity, a curious oubliette into which numbers could be thrown. But when I had the equations written out, I wondered what might be done with the numbers I had so transformed. After three distracted days at the faculty I found myself at home again, applying my new toy to the P vs. NP problem. And I solved it.

  I can’t explain the shock to a layman. Working on P vs. NP is like alchemy in the middle ages. We mathematicians guard our formulae greedily, because whoever finds a provable solution would have the world at their feet. And it was easy. It took me an hour.

  Oh, the actual transformation into Rigolo space was very complex indeed – taking the numbers through that labyrinth of equations – but once I was there, I could turn them this way and that, and demonstrate that every problem a computer could readily verify, it could also solve.

  I didn’t believe it. I checked my maths, and then again and I still didn’t believe it. Then I called over Jayne Shen from Cornell and swore her to secrecy. It took her all night to understand, but that was just to grasp the transformation. Once she understood where I had sent the numbers, the P vs. NP proof itself was child’s play.

  And once she knew, I had to go to the faculty and make the announcement because Jayne wouldn’t be able to keep silent about something that big forever.

  This started my two weeks of fame. For those two weeks I was the most celebrated individual in the academic world.

  Because the Rigolo Transformation was the magic key to every door. I could prove Yang-Mills theory too, and I was suddenly closer to filling in all the holes in the Navier-Stokes equations than anybody had ever been. Rigolo space was a mathematical wonderland, where insuperably complex problems broke down and yielded up their secrets at the merest push. All you had to do was work through my dauntingly complex steps to get there. That alone lost most of my peers. Only a few ever managed to work through the Transformation themselves, and inelegantly. It was an art of which I alone was master, and it could do anything.

  For those two weeks, just about every pure mathematician in the world was praising me in public and damning me in private because I’d put them out of work. Reuben Tolly, the faculty dean, was especially effusive. I was going to be the figurehead of his new expanded maths department. I was his new golden girl, who would bring in the money and the students and the prizes.

  Tolly was never a man for numbers, aside from accounts. And for those two weeks everyone else was too dazed with trying to understand the transformation to discover the one shortcoming with my work. I didn’t see it myself. I was too busy believing in my own genius.

  Then Han Lin at the Beijing University of Aeronautics sent me a polite email. He had been working on the P vs. NP problem longer than I’d been alive and was a noted speaker about the real world effects of a solution. While everyone else had been wrestling with the transformation, Han had quietly gone about attempting to actually use my results.

  I was a pure mathematician. I had never thought to try and apply those maths to the world, That was someone else’s job.

  Doctor Han discovered the one key problem with the Rigolo Transformation. It wasn’t reversible. Once the numbers had been shunted into Rigolo space, you could do with them what you wished; they were endlessly compliant. Except, in order to use my golden solutions in the real world, those Rigolo numbers needed to be transformed back into regular numbers. And when you did, as Doctor Han found out, they made no sense. They arrived back through the hedge of my equations stripped of all meaning. None of my proofs carried over.

  For a week after that, a blazing argument raged in the polite and restrained way of international mathematicians. And I was so convinced that Han was wrong and I was right. Because, for all the others found it so impenetrably complex, the Rigolo Transformation was beautiful, irresistibly elegant. I couldn’t believe it was not also true.

  But there came a night when I set to repeating Doctor Han’s calculations, if only to prove him wrong. I couldn’t prove him w
rong. What went in as rational numbers, and became transformed to mathematical gold, came out as gibberish.

  And I went further. I had already applied the Rigolo Transformation to the great mathematical questions of the age. Now I applied it to wilder matters, ludicrous problems with no solutions. I found that, in Rigolo space, I could prove anything. The numbers became infinitely malleable. I could prove without a doubt that two was two. I could prove with equal ease that two was three.

  The Rigolo Transformation, for all its perfection, was meaningless. Nothing of it survived into the real world. I had, with great and global fanfare, discovered a minor mathematical curiosity. The big questions remained unsolved, because my solutions to them meant nothing.

  The next morning I gave an official statement accepting the Beijing position. Immediately after, I went to Tolly and offered my resignation.

  Even after I gave up, a few of my supporters would not let go. They were seduced by the hollow beauty of Rigolo space and claimed it for more than just a mathematical magic mirror, showing you whatever you wanted. They became more of an embarrassment to me even than my own brash foolishness.

  That was when I first heard from Doctor Albrecht Schochtauer and became aware of his own far-from-spotless reputation. Just then he was one of many whose continued support was a reminder of something I was trying to get away from.

  Tolly was properly condescending as he refused to accept my resignation. My colleagues behaved similarly. In my two weeks of fame I had not been humble about my discovery. Women in my position too often kill their careers by being so humble that others get all the credit. Personally, I have never known where the line is drawn: too reserved, too brash, too proud, too well dressed, too pretty, too plain. The one thing most of my colleagues, superiors and students never cared about was whether my work was good, and that was the only arena I have ever felt equipped to fight in.