Napier's Bones

by Derryl Murphy

  “Nice synchronicity,” said Dom. “But the chances of finding an artefact like that are pretty slim, aren’t they?”

  Arithmos arose from the teeming mass of numbers on the small stage below them. “You must come down to me,” called the numbers. “Now!”

  Dom didn’t pause to think about what might require the urgency he heard in Arithmos’ voice. He jumped over the railing and dropped to the ground below, calling up numbers to soften the blow of the fall. On the stage, Arithmos briefly shimmered, static overriding its presence, but when Dom dismissed the numbers they rushed back to rejoin the body of his numerical companion. “Sorry,” he called.

  “It was understandable,” replied Arithmos. “Now please, onto the stage.”

  All around them now were roars and calls, as well as screams and calls for help from people outside of the theatre. The sky overhead was swiftly turning black with numbers, both from the spinning Bones and from flocks of numbers that came from every direction to join in. With one last frightened look above, Dom pulled himself up to join Arithmos on stage.

  “Oh my,” said Billy. “I can taste the numbers, the history here.” He stepped across the boards of the stage, testing its limits, swinging his arms wide. He tilted his head back and shouted, “I hope good luck lies in odd numbers. ‘There is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death!’”

  Dom rolled his eyes. “That one of your poems?”

  Billy shook his head. “It was Shakespeare. Mind you, he also wrote, ‘Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, the numbers of the feared.’ Not quite as reassuring, I think.”

  “‘A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers,’” said Arithmos, and Dom could swear he heard some humour in its voice.

  “I get it,” he answered, nervously tapping his right foot. “You’re both better read than me. Maybe I could quote some baseball stats instead of a play some dead guy once wrote.”

  Billy grinned in return, but said nothing.

  In the meantime in the sky above, gryphons and dragons were fighting off all manner of other flying beasts, as well as numbers that had coagulated into deadly, angry forms. But they were horrendously outnumbered, and soon the last of the defenders broke into thousands of tiny pieces and fell from the sky. Numbers and animated statues alike now swarmed the floor of the theatre, and Dom flinched as he reached for the hopelessly tiny help the puck might bring, but all of them stopped dead at the foot of the stage.

  “How is this possible?” asked Dom, shouting to be heard over the roar of the swarm of creatures and numbers at their feet.

  “It’s the stage itself,” replied Billy. “The numbers in the boards are somehow able to resist Napier’s call.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” said Dom, willing his body back to the centre of the stage. Billy had marched them right to the edge, daring one of the hissing and roaring multitude to reach across and tear him, them, to pieces. “I’m pretty damn sure that the boards that make up this stage aren’t the same ones that made the stage when this theatre first existed.”

  “The numbers lay fallow for hundreds of years, Dom,” said Arithmos, surprisingly still intact. “When the Globe was rebuilt, they sought it out. All they wanted was their original piece of the ecology, old wood or new.”

  “If they’re a part of the ecology, then how is it they’re not turning against me?”

  “They may yet,” replied Arithmos. “When Napier and his ilk arrive. But for the moment they’re content to stay in place. A sure sign that Shakespeare was a numerate, I would say. Even over the centuries he’s managed to exercise control over them.”

  There was a new commotion in the middle of the metal and stone beasts, followed by a loud crash. Dozens of them fell to the ground, and from out of the middle of the swarm stepped Jenna.

  Subset

  The distance between Jenna and Dom was infinitesimally small, she discovered. She could almost reach out and touch him, but held back, still unsure of what she could do, more unsure of what she should do. Whatever it was that had been causing him trouble—Napier or something fashioned by Napier or his numbers—seemed to have left off, and although for the moment he seemed little more than a hazy blur to her, she could tell that he was safe, or at least as safe as he could be under the circumstances.

  Instead of going right to him, then, she continued to forge a path in his direction, a passage that was as circuitous as possible. And circuitous not just in physical distance but in time as well. The further she travelled the easier it was to focus on learning from the numbers and to use less of her attention on the actual travel. Less focus on the travel and therefore her surroundings meant less focus on time, which paradoxically meant that less time actually changed for her. Soon enough she found she had gone almost the entire length of Britain, from the Point of Stoer in Scotland to the outskirts of Cambridge. The numbers swirling around her showed that she’d walked almost 500 miles to this city north of London, but she could just as easily have walked from one end of the USU campus to the other; she felt no exhaustion or hunger at all.

  Jenna stood at the side of a now-busy road, surrounded on all sides by suburbs, surprised to find herself there so soon. “Heisenberg spent some time here not long after the war,” said Quanta. “But we first took special notice of him when he came to lecture in St. Andrews in Scotland. That was when he presented us with the notebook, for safekeeping and for the possibility that one day someone would arrive who could control the numbers he and his people had unleashed onto the world.”

  “I can’t find him,” said Jenna, frowning and waving off the history lesson. “Where’s Dom? Where’s Billy?” She looked briefly to the numbers and then turned attention back in the direction of the unseen London skyline. “Do you know where they are?”

  “We don’t,” was the reply. “And if we actively try to look for him, we’ll only bring on Napier’s attention. Patience is the key now. Wait for them to show themselves.”

  “But these numbers I’ve been shown, this quantum view of the world, that’s another way.” Jenna squeezed together her fists in frustration. “How can something like that bring on Napier’s attention? Why is it that suddenly I find myself here and close to Dom and suddenly I can’t see him anymore?”

  “All of this time learning from us and still you don’t understand,” said Quanta. “This is why we were worried about you rushing in too quickly. Without a complete knowledge of the gift you’ve been given and the responsibilities it imparts, anything you do will be dangerous, to you and to everyone else.”

  Jenna responded with a curt nod. “Anything I do will have consequences that reach beyond what normal mathematics is capable of dealing with, I understand,” she said. “I also understand that if Napier is allowed to regain control of his bones, not only does his own body come back, but then the change in his own control of numbers will make things all the worse. For everyone: numerates, regular people, and for numbers too. Right?”

  The numerical being—so different from their previous companion, differences that she wondered if any other numerate would even be able to sense—paused for a moment, and then seemed to nod its head, a rush of numbers tumbling up and down, disappearing and then reconstituting in multiple locations, once even to the point that it seemed to be casting a numerical shadow as well, or perhaps a faded doppelgänger, a momentary replica from somewhere and somewhen else. “We are willing to admit that you could be right, as small as that chance is,” said Quanta. “Although we feel you could deal with Napier well enough sometime further into the future, there is no guarantee that he would allow you to live that long once he got word of your existence.”

  “Get him now, while he’s still in my mother’s body and not hanging onto the Bones, or run and hide and hope that he doesn’t find me before I’m able to handle the new and improved version.” With some hesitation, the numbers nodded, and Jenna pressed on. “But that’s less important to me. Right now, the only idea is to save Dom a
nd Billy. Everything else is secondary.”

  The numerical being broke apart and flashed through the air and into Jenna with a great rush and briefly staggered her, and as it did so it spoke one last time, directly into her mind: In that case, we are here and at your service.

  And then, at that very moment, there was an enormous explosion of numbers deep in the heart of London, reaching up to the sky like the roiling, angry cast-off of a negative image nuclear bomb and dark enough to cast the day into an angry and horrible shadow, and Jenna knew where she needed to go.

  24

  Just as Dom noticed Jenna, a horrific grinding noise rattled the air, the sound of a buzz saw cutting through thick layers of rusted metal accompanied by teeth, not nails, scraping along a blackboard. Dom flinched, but when the noise had stopped he saw that all the statuary beasts had come to a halt, some in mid-step; the two still flying overhead plummeted to earth. The stone one crashed through the roof above the seats before falling in smaller pieces to the ground, its metal cousin crumpled and dented close by.

  Numbers still swam through the air, ferociously trying to attack them, but whatever mojo the stage offered was holding up well for them. Dom looked down at the box in his hands, saw that the Bones had stopped spinning. Numbers from them rushed off in a horizontal vortex towards Jenna, but instead of running into her or even dodging around her, they dissipated in seemingly random sequences, and then some even seemed to reappear, although in a much more mellow mood than they had been an instant before, floating aimlessly off into the sky.

  “Dom!” shouted Jenna, gesturing wildly.

  Dom waved back, then felt a blinding pain in his head and staggered to his knees, the theatre spinning past his eyes. He put a hand to the back of his skull, felt the rising lump and the wet smear that told him he was bleeding, then closed his eyes when he realized which hand he was using.

  He wasn’t holding the Bones anymore.

  Arithmos reached out and touched his wounded skull.

  Subset

  Jenna ran from the encroaching spotlight and numbers, turned around to see Dom spin the Bones. A swirling, sparkling tornado of numbers completely engulfed him for a moment, and then dropped away, and Dom was no longer there. The spotlight wavered and then also disappeared, but the numbers with it did nothing of the sort, instead turned their attention to her, racing over the grasses and heather in her direction, steam rising from the heat of the attention of numbers and sunshine, those numbers light enough to be prone to its effect momentarily tumbling upwards in the rising heated air. Jenna stumbled and caught herself, ran hard in the direction Arithmos had told her to go.

  The numbers came hard at her, but at the last second they dissolved, seemed to jump in one direction or another or even both—it was so hard for her to tell—and then, after one horrifically frightening moment in which they all seemed to multiply into a seemingly infinite series, they were all gone. Jenna blinked in surprise, then followed the path at a slow jog for as long as she could keep it up, before finally settling into an easy walk, dictated partly by exhaustion and partly by the weather and the state of the path.

  Eventually more numbers rose up from nowhere, but these ones made no move towards her, only came into being and then faded away once she had passed them, to be replaced by similar numbers further along. Signposts of a sort, she hoped, marking the trail for her.

  After twenty minutes or so she saw that the numbers no longer showed her the main path, and instead led her off trail and through heather and over rocks. She looked around, saw no sign of anyone following, and trudged off the trail to follow the numbers, uphill at an angle that, while not terribly easy, was at least not straight up. On the trail or off, there was not much of anything she could see; the rain was no longer coming down and the wind had finally died, but clouds had descended low enough to brush against the ground. The sense of isolation she felt was complete. Even the sounds of the wind and the waves and the seabirds were muffled, so distant that she sometimes feared she had slipped away and into another world.

  Finally, though, she came to a small pile of stones, the largest of them about the size of a decent hardcover dictionary, with the last set of numbers resting atop of them. A wet and cranky-looking black and brown cat sat beside the rocks, licking at the edge of one paw and watching her approach. She stopped and squatted down about twenty feet away from it, unsure what she was to do now.

  The cat stood and pawed at the stones, and they broke apart, each piece turning itself into a constituent group of smaller pieces, until eventually all of them had crumbled into nothing but dust. Then it stepped back, and she stood and cautiously approached, having no idea what she might find.

  25

  All of this Dom had seen, but now he was back in his body again, blinding pain in the back of his skull as Billy tried to pull him up to his knees. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “You’re back?” asked Billy. “You were knocked unconscious.”

  Dom tried to shake his head, wincing in pain at the motion. “I wasn’t. I was in Jenna again, but this time it was earlier, just after we parted.”

  Billy started to say something, then stopped. “Never mind right now. We have trouble.”

  But before Dom could react, he found himself spinning away to Jenna’s past once again.

  26

  Jenna reached down into the dust where the cat had pawed, and the cat itself stepped around to the other side of the crumbled rocks, always keeping a careful eye on her. After a few seconds of searching she pulled out a wooden box about the size of a video cassette.

  “We have, over the centuries, taken to storing artefacts in various safe places,” came a voice from behind her. Startled, she turned, hands in front of her face and ready to fight or, more likely, to run. But then she relaxed; it was Arithmos. “With some of these artefacts, we’ve had no idea what would ever be done with them, if there would ever be anyone who could successfully and safely use them.” It gestured at the box. “This is one of those items. Truth be told, we never expected there would be a time where this artefact would be unveiled.”

  She looked at it. The wood was rough, unvarnished and not sanded. Instead of hinges, two pieces of leather were tacked to the body and to the lid, and it was held closed by a length of ancient string. “Safely use it?” She didn’t like the sound of that.

  “We’ve watched you from the beginning of this odyssey of yours,” said Arithmos. “How could we not notice how unable we are to interact with you? At least, in terms of the mathematical ecology as most numerates understand them.”

  The clouds were lifting, and Jenna looked out to the ocean, to a tall jutting rock that thrust up out of the water and to seabirds that wheeled around it, unknowingly creating patterns that buffeted in the air behind them. She was suddenly struck by a sense that she was on the top of that rock, leaning over the edge and balanced precariously as she looked down into a new form of chaos.

  “You know why?”

  Arithmos seemed to nod. “We believe so. Open the box and discover for yourself.”

  She hesitated. Even touching the box brought about all sorts of unbidden images, so clear and at the same time so bizarrely indistinct. There was change in this box, somehow she knew, and she wasn’t so sure it was change she would be able to keep in check.

  “Without this artefact and the abilities it brings out in you, we know for sure that Dom and Billy will not be able to last the next twelve hours,” said Arithmos. “Napier has grown to the point where he is far too strong. Which means that Napier will get his hands on his Bones, an event that will likely result in the extinction of the numerical ecology as we know it, to say nothing of major changes to the non-numerate world.”

  “How so? What exactly is it that Napier will do?”

  “Even as an adjunct, Napier is too powerful. Once reconstituted, everything changes. He’ll have proven that he is no longer mortal, and will have control of all numbers. You need to know that mathematics lies at the
heart of the very existence of the world and of the entire universe, even for something as intangible as the forward motion of time. Eternity for Napier will be however he sees it, but we can assure you that for us it will feel like a very long time. To say nothing of what changes he makes will be wrought on humanity.”

  Jenna shook her head. “But I can feel something similar in here,” she said, and shook the box in her hands at the numbers in front of her.

  Arithmos shrugged. “What happens if you succeed, if we are indeed right about not only you but the artefact you hold, is that we are freed completely, not reduced to slavery ever again. There may be pockets of time and space where this does not happen, but we believe that it will work in our favour.”

  “Provided I’m able to use this and somehow figure out how to stop Napier.”

  The numbers slowly nodded. “Provided so, yes.”

  Jenna untied the string, a difficult task with the knot being so old and her fingers chilled and tired. But finally she managed, and opened the lid. Inside were some papers loosely bound into a book, each imbued with numbers that didn’t run away from her, instead seemed to see who she was. They rose through the air at an almost languid pace, touched down on both of her shoulders, then reached in and tickled her mind, gave her hints of what could be, what might be, what would be.

  She smiled, and behind her the cat hissed, for a moment almost impossibly appearing to be both dead and alive. And then at that very moment, Jenna seemed to multiply, to be everywhere at once. Learning, finally finding what it was she was meant to discover.