Napier's Bones

by Derryl Murphy

  “Search numbers always have a little bit of autonomy,” said Billy. “But they’re pretty predictable, as well. If you have the time, there are several ways to set up little traps for them, devices that will lock them in place long enough for you to get away. But as we saw down in Utah, usually time isn’t on your side.”

  “So where do we go now?”

  “North, to Edmonton. Most folk in the States know about Calgary, so that’s likely where she—they—will be watching, but there aren’t many who pay attention to anything further north.”

  Jenna rolled the window down about an inch and leaned back, her head turned to the right. Dom couldn’t tell if she had closed her eyes or was just watching the world go by, so he kept quiet, surveyed the surrounding landscape, the fields of wheat standing tall and still in the calm air. Off in the distance pump jacks worked oil or gas up from deep underground, swaying back and forth like slow-bucking broncs, and releasing ancient integers that hadn’t been seen since the time of dinosaurs, the numbers briefly rustling back and forth in the air before dropping back to the ground and trying to dig their way back to their zone of fossilized comfort. Dom had tried to capture and use some of those numbers, once, but their forms had been so severely altered by time and pressure that they had been virtually unrecognizable to him, resulting in a minor backlash that had given him a square inch patch of rough, pebbly skin on his right thigh that had lasted for weeks and, despite copious amounts of ointment, had remained itchy as hell for weeks more after it had disappeared.

  Sometimes, rarely, they would pass a car or truck, and a couple of times were overtaken by cars in a hurry to get to their destination, but the road was relatively peaceful. There were no more numbers threatening them, in the distance or up close, and Dom was used to this sort of lifestyle. He was constantly on the road, moving from one city or town to another, always on the hunt for more mojo, always looking for the one artefact that would put him over the top. Dom figured that he would eventually make his way across the pond to Europe, but there was so much still going on here in North America; many artefacts had come across with the earliest settlers and had continued to come, finding their way to lands where the history of numeracy had still been unwritten.

  subset

  Ruth reeled off primes in her mind, trying to force herself back to the surface, but no matter what she did now, the numbers no longer wanted to work for her in any meaningful way. Above and around her, the shadow that had taken control seemed able to run her body without any special effort, and somehow she could tell that he was aware of her own struggle, aware but apparently not at all concerned.

  She could still see out of her own eyes, was a part of every physical thing that her body took part in, but try as she might she could find no way to control any of it. Everything she did and saw felt distant, like wearing a thick set of gloves to turn the pages of a newspaper, or like looking through an antique window at the leading edge of twilight.

  More immediate to her, after initially catching the edges of it, was the heavy sensation of anger that emanated from him. No, not anger; rage. His fury was so complete, and now that she was aware of, so overwhelming, that it took over everything else. This, she could touch and see and feel. There was no sense of distance anymore, and it scared her. Would she always be a party to his emotions? More frightening, would she eventually be pushed completely under by their strength, and eventually never find her way back to the surface?

  She tried to close off her mind to the emotions and concentrated again on primes, this time not to fight her way back into control but just to keep herself afloat.

  Perissos iskhuros teos esti, hos ēs emeos, said a voice inside her head.

  She didn’t recognize the voice or the language, and worried for a moment that he was playing games with her while she was locked inside her own body. But still, she decided to respond, perhaps with the faint hope that interaction would provide her with a clue for how to escape. Who is that? she thought, not sure if she was doing this right or, maybe, that she was buried so deep she’d already gone insane and was talking to herself in different languages and with a male voice.

  Metagignoskō, nomizō. . . I’m so very sorry. It has been so long since I tried to communicate with anyone that I forget that I am not speaking in your language. It was a man’s voice inside her head, thickly accented, although very oddly, like a melange of accents from many different times and places. What I tried to tell you was that he is too strong for you, just as he was for me. Just as he’ll be for anyone, I fear. Soon enough you’ll do as he asks, speak your voice as his proxy.

  These words were not what she wanted to hear. Who are you? she asked again. How is it that there’s another shadow in here, not just the one?

  There was a long period of silence, a hesitation that she felt directly, as if she was standing there watching someone collect their thoughts before responding. I’m told my name is Archimedes, said the man, but that is only from what I’ve been told, not from any memories of my own. All I recall is that I was wrenched out of antiquity when he was very young, and I have been tied to him all these centuries since, when he was both alive and dead.

  Ruth felt a charge of fear run through her then. If someone else could be stuck with her shadow for all this time and not be able to manage any change or escape, what chance did she have? Even worse, she realized that this might end up being her own fate, sitting lodged deep inside her own body, so far down that eventually she would lose whatever it was that defined her as a person, eventually to the point that she would forget her name, her essence, become nothing but an essentially voiceless shadow on display for nobody. Why would he hold you so close that your shadow still stays with his, centuries after his death? How is he able to do this?

  You do know who it is who took control of your body, I trust? asked the voice.

  If Ruth could have frowned she would have. At first I thought maybe this was someone who had been caught trying for the same thing I had been brought to, she replied.

  You would be wrong. How much do you know about John Napier the man?

  It was like a body blow. She knew what the likelihood had been, but had fought to deny it until just now. Instead of trying to deny the reality of her situation any further, though, Ruth cast back into her memories, trying to find what she’d learned about him. If there’d ever been any mention about John Napier when she was in school, aside from the small possibility that they’d been taught his name in conjunction with the invention of logarithms, she couldn’t remember. But in the years since, her wanderings in search of a numerate holy grail had brought her to many sources that had, even if only in passing, mentioned John Napier. I know he was a mathematician, and inventor, too, in Scotland around the same time that Shakespeare was alive. Probably a pretty powerful numerate, too, I imagine.

  The shadow allowed itself a small chuckle. Powerful is an understatement. An inventor, yes. But one thing I know, listening in on his thoughts when I get the rare chance, many of his inventions were exact duplicates of devices I had apparently thought up so many aiōnes before.

  He let that thought hang in the air while Ruth chewed on it for a few seconds. Finally, she asked, You mean to say he plagiarized you?

  So it seems, was the reply. From what I’ve been able to gather, reading and listening to Napier, and from the few memories I have of that time, he was looking for ways to curry favour with the leaders of his country in order to gain access to artefacts that would enable his numerate growth. It did not take long for him to become what is likely the most powerful numerate ever. A status he may still hold, hundreds of years after his death and controlling the body of a hapless woman and the sorry, forgetful shadow of a long-dead man with a knowledge of ancient Greek.

  The most powerful ever. Ruth didn’t doubt it, right now didn’t doubt anything other than her ability to get out from under him.

  9

  Dom decided they would stop in the town of Drumheller for a late lunch, coasting al
ong a dry, brown landscape into the town; once there, Jenna commented on all of the statues of dinosaurs that sat beside the road. In the middle of pointing one out she suddenly squealed with delight and told Dom to turn left. He did, and ahead of him he saw an enormous dinosaur, a T-rex, he imagined, standing beside a parking lot. Children and adults drifted by, not paying attention to him or to any other traffic, so he inched along until he finally found a parking spot.

  “That thing is enormous,” said Billy as they climbed out of the car, tilting back Dom’s head so he could see to the top. From inside the mouth a hand waved, and Dom realized with a start that people could climb up the inside of the creature, like a toothsome predatory version of the Statue of Liberty.

  “I want to go up,” said Jenna. She was grinning madly from ear to ear; this was probably the first time she’d really felt happy since she’d fallen into this travelling disaster.

  Dom grinned back, and after squinting his eyes at the dinosaur to check out the numbers and obviously deciding that it was safe, nodded. “But first, let’s get some lunch. I need to refuel before I climb that much.”

  A restaurant down the road took American dollars, and after a restroom break they each had a burger and fries, and Dom ate a salad as well. Once they were done he told Jenna to pull some money from her pocket and taught her how to remove the serial numbers so they couldn’t be tracked. “You don’t actually physically remove them,” said Dom. “It’s not like you’re using an eraser on paper. If you did, pretty soon a non-numerate would catch you out and accuse you of trying to pass some funny money.”

  “So what do you do?” She leaned across the table to get a better view, and Dom angled his body to help.

  “There’s something like a coating on the numbers, which is the little bit of mojo that the bills have that has combined with the numbers you have on your person, to say nothing of the mojo of every other person, numerate or non-numerate, who has ever handled the money.”

  Jenna looked up at him. “What, like all the stuff we carry?”

  Dom shook his head. “Not quite. More like, we leak. All the time, no matter how much you protect yourself against it, your body is losing numbers, which then get replenished.”

  “It’s a very large closed system,” said Billy. “Think of it as a kind of ecology of numbers.”

  “Or like breathing,” said Dom. “Some numbers out, some numbers in.”

  “Then what does this do?” asked Jenna, holding up her wrist and tapping the wire wrapped around it.

  “Well, we leak, but without the protection of something, whether it’s a temporary fix like a series of prime or random numbers, or else something a little more solid, like the wire, then to someone who is looking for us and knows our numerical scent, it’s like we have a spotlight spilling from our bodies and lighting up the sky.”

  “A spotlight bright enough to overpower the sun,” added Billy. “As long as you have the eyes to see it.”

  “Those numbers pour out of every orifice, large and small, even microscopic, every second of our lives. They’re the symbols of our lives, the factors that create and re-create themselves every moment, reproducing in numerical form our lives right down to the cellular—hell, probably the molecular or atomic—level.”

  “And they’re like fingerprints,” said Billy, waggling the fingers on Dom’s left hand, “so the numbers that your body produces can be compared to the numbers from Dom’s body and the difference spotted by anyone with the numeracy and the knowledge to tell them apart.”

  “Someone like the person with the search numbers that keeps almost finding us.”

  Dom nodded, and said, “Right. So what we have to do is wipe away any scent of us in the numerical traces we leave behind. Yes, you can take the physical numbers right off as well. . . .” He smeared away the serial number on one bill, rubbing at it while concentrating on a sequence that helped reduce the numbers to nothing. “But if you watch how I work the numbers . . .” Here he concentrated and with a press of his thumb placed the physical numbers back on the bill, then worked them over so that the mojo numbers slid off and drifted up and through the ceiling.

  “If they go up there, how do we know they won’t be found and we won’t be tracked down?” asked Jenna, watching them as they slid through stained panelling and out of sight.

  “If the numbers stayed here in the restaurant, even if they fell to the floor, they’d leave a pretty solid path for someone to follow,” answered Dom. “So what you have to make sure is that when you free the numbers from their constraints, like I just did, you have to give them a little push to make them ephemeral. Ghost-like,” he said, seeing the question forming on her lips. “Once it gets freed from the item that has factored its existence, which in this case is the rather tenuous life of a twenty dollar bill, then it drifts up and breaks up somewhere high in the sky, with individual numbers usually falling to earth and rejoining the numerical ecology in all sorts of places, depending on the winds and the moods of the numbers they seek to join.”

  “You make them sound almost intelligent.”

  “Like we said before,” responded Billy, “numbers do have some degree of autonomy. Ones that numerates create can have even more, like the search numbers. But all are still constricted by the natural order of the world. When Dom uses the word mood, he could just as easily be talking about which bonds work and which ones don’t, if you remember back to high school chemistry.”

  Dom handed Jenna another bill. “You try.”

  She took it from him and concentrated on getting a response from the numbers, just like Dom had shown her. As she did, her focus seemed to waver for just a fraction of a second and all the numbers jumped crazily around, seeming to replicate themselves and even scatter like dominoes being knocked down after having been set up. She closed her eyes to shut out the strange, sickly sensation it gave her, and when she opened them again Dom was staring at her.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked her.

  “Feel what?”

  Dom shook his head. “That’s the third time it’s felt like I’ve been inside your head, looking out through your eyes, like I’m an adjunct for a second.”

  Jenna frowned at him, pursing her lips. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What I did feel, and see, was the numbers behaving very strangely for me.”

  “I saw that,” said Billy. “Did you not, Dom?”

  Dom stared back at her for a second, and then just shrugged his shoulders. “I . . . did, but that’s not what I was talking about.” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  Jenna turned her attention back to the money in her hand. At first the numbers kept slipping away from her, a very strange reaction, but after a few tries they were watching them float up through the ceiling as well. She smiled and looked over at Dom, who grinned and patted her on the back. “Good job.”

  Dom’s palm slapped on the table. “Let’s go climb a dinosaur, shall we?” said Billy. They got up, waved good-bye to the proprietor, and crossed the road to the giant T-rex.

  10

  Dom paid the entrance fee with coins from his pocket, which required less work to remove their traces. Then they climbed the metal stairs, the insides of the dinosaur lit with red lights and showing traceries of fake fossils along the walls on the way up. Adults on their own or in pairs and groups, families with noisy children, some being carried by sweating, overweight parents wearing knee-length shorts and canopy-sized t-shirts with various touristy slogans about Canada blazoned on the front; all were struggling up or down the stairs, sandals and shoes slapping and echoing on the steps, the sounds intermingling with the shrieks of excited and tired children.

  “Remind me again why we’re here?” asked Billy. Dom was breathing hard, which made it difficult for the shadow to get the words out.

  “Something to do,” answered Jenna, having trouble right now with her own breathing. “A chance to relax,” Dom barked a short laugh, “not have to be on the road all the time, or running from
those numbers.”

  “Plus,” said Dom, still panting, “sometimes you just gotta do the weird shit. And what’s weirder than climbing a giant dinosaur in the middle of a small town in the desert?”

  Billy grinned in response, and Dom could feel by the stretch of his cheeks that the adjunct was feeling as relaxed as he was. It was a nice feeling, finally being able to take a little bit of time and just enjoy it for what it was, rather than worrying about what was around the next corner.

  They came to the last flight of stairs, and once again squeezed up against the railing to let a large family tumble by, parents feebly calling for their kids to slow down and watch for the other people. By the time they got to the top, though, they had it to themselves.

  The viewing platform was in the bottom of the dinosaur’s mouth, small steps leading down to stand in its jaws, Plexiglas set up to keep people from tumbling or jumping over the edge, enormous fibreglass teeth sticking out as a jagged counterpoint to the lumpy but rounded landscape of the countryside around the town. Down below was a splash park, children running and screaming and getting blessedly soaked in the heat of the day. Not as hot here as it had been in Utah, but it was still warm.