A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  For all he knew, the thing might have climbed back out of the water already and be sunning itself on one of the rocks in the middle of the pond. All the ugly things looked alike to him. And if he waded into the pool and started grabbing all the turtles to check for rings around their necks, two things would happen. All the box shells would snap shut. And somebody would call the campus police.

  Scowling, Vern pulled out his phone and searched for a picture of Caspica caspica.

  “You know that guy who’s always hanging around here?” Jimmy DiGrazio had brought a large pizza to his new desk in Allandale House, and for some reason we were all drifting towards him.

  “Lensky?” Ben groaned.

  “Nah, he went off somewhere. This guy is younger.”

  I did not exactly feel disappointed that Lensky was gone. After all, we’d have a lot more freedom to act without him watching us; we could get straight to work on Ben’s project without even pretending it had anything to do with terrorists.

  It was more a feeling of…oh, unfinished business.

  Business I had consciously decided not to finish, because getting involved with the man would be a very bad idea.

  Apparently my subconscious hadn’t gotten the message.

  “Younger than Lensky,” Ben said to Jimmy, “is hardly a definitive description. Everyone is younger than the spook.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” I interrupted him.

  “Tomato, tomahto.” I might never forgive Lensky for introducing that meme into our conversation. “This is a college campus, Lia. Everybody’s younger than us, too. Except for the grad students and faculty.”

  “You know the guy I mean,” Jimmy amplified. “Looks kind of like a blurred copy of Ben, except for the big wet mouth, usually has a bunch of papers in his hand…”

  “Vern Trexler?” I suggested.

  Jimmy’s eyes widened. “That’s what he looks like? I always pictured something more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame in his mommy’s basement.”

  “The Hunchback of Notre Dame was abandoned as a baby,” Ingrid said.

  “And even if he lived with his mother, she wouldn’t have had a basement, because the Paris sewers are disgusting.” Ben contributed.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if the intense concentration needed for our work led to a lack of concentration outside of work. Mathematicians seem to have a unique talent for being sidetracked by irrelevant details.

  “Fiction aside,” I said, “how do you know Vern, and how on earth do you know him without knowing what he looks like?”

  “Gaming,” said Jimmy. “He’s Morph the Maganimous on World of Wizardry. I tracked down his real ID once because I was beginning to suspect he was a bot; I couldn’t believe any actual human being could be as whiny as Morph, always coming up with reasons why whatever just happened to him shouldn’t count. But I just glanced at the resumé, I didn’t look for a picture. Why would I? I didn’t expect to be running into him outside virtual reality.”

  “Well, now you have,” Ben said, “That guy is the most persistently pestiferous pest in the known universe.”

  “He has this insane desire to become an underpaid Research Fellow here,” I explained.

  “Insanity is not necessarily a problem,” said Ingrid, “but lack of talent is.”

  Jimmy looked skeptical. “Well, I think he might have become too insane even for this crowd. When I walked past the Turtle Pond just now, he was stuffing a box turtle into a backpack.”

  Ben and I looked at each other.

  “Mr. M.,” he said.

  “Vern probably would cut off his head.”

  “To be fair, that is what Mr. M. asked us to do.”

  “I don’t care, there has to be some other way to get that ring off him. We’ve got to get him back before Vern kills him.”

  “Jimmy, did your research on Trexler include a recent address? No? Get one. Now! It’s an emergency!” Ben turned to me. “I’ll get my car, pick you up out front.”

  Jimmy grumbled a bit about his pizza getting cold, but settled down to his research with reasonably good grace. It probably helped that he could type pretty well with the first two fingers of his left hand, leaving the right hand free to convey triangles of pepperoni and red glop to his mouth. Texting has created some very odd typing styles.

  I was downstairs with the address just as Ben screeched to a dramatic halt in front of Allandale House. “Do try not to attract the attention of the campus cops, ok? We don’t have time for that.”

  “Where am I going?”

  It wasn’t far; the address was just off Speedway, in an area north of campus full of old houses and garage apartments and a few small, shabby apartment buildings dating from the early sixties. The relatively cheap housing attracted a lot of students. In fact, the apartment Ingrid and I shared wasn’t far away.

  Unfortunately, all the students except me had cars, and they were all home this afternoon and using up the parking spaces along the street. Didn’t anybody go to class any more?

  “Drop me here,” I said when Ben pulled up outside a shabby house with a privacy fence. “It’s either this house or the garage apartment behind it. Come back as soon as you ditch the car, ok?”

  “And you don’t go running in there until I’m back,” he ordered.

  Ben and Lensky – two peas in the same pod? Or had Lensky infected Ben with the idea that I not only needed protection, but would wait like a helpless maiden until a protector showed up?

  Vern was getting frustrated. This had to be the magic turtle that Ben and Lia had been talking to. The ring was easy enough to see, a gleam of gold digging into the soft flesh of the turtle’s neck.

  His first try had involved dousing the animal’s head and neck with olive oil. That had been a pure waste of time. The ring was stuck so tight that not a drop of oil got under it, and now both the turtle and Vern’s hands were all slippery. He would have to go to Plan B. The problem was, how could he make sure the turtle wouldn’t pull its neck into the shell as soon as he let go?

  He couldn’t. But at least he could flip the turtle upside down so the beast wouldn’t go anywhere while he hunted for his landlord’s hatchet. And a good thing too, because it took him quite a while to figure out that the hatchet was hanging on two nails on the garage wall rather than buried in the kindling chopping block, where he would have left it.

  Caspica caspica was still where he’d left it, waving its stupid little flippers as though it had a hope of touching the ground and flipping right side up. Good, it could stay like that for… a few…

  Whap!

  Vern jumped back and nearly chopped his own toes. The first hatchet blow had been a spectacular miss, coming down right in the center of the undershell and spattering turtle parts and liquids everywhere. Good thing he was wearing glasses; he wouldn’t have liked to get something like that in his eyes.

  He aimed more carefully the second time. And the third. God, who knew it was so difficult to control a hatchet? Oh well, at least now the shell was so thoroughly destroyed that the turtle’s neck lay flat on the ground, barely twitching. Vern brought the hatchet down one more time and severed the neck, grabbed the twitching head and yanked off the ring. It had to be some kind of ring of power. Dropping the disgusting severed head, he slipped the ring over his thumb and frowned. Nothing felt all that different.

  In fact, the “difference” was just that some parts of the universe which Vern did not believe in anyway were now invisible and inaudible to him. He did not hear the cries coming from the turtle’s severed head, nor did he see the stream of bright points of light that poured from the neck. All he saw was the mess of hacked-up body parts on the ground before him. He should clean up…

  Vern vomited on the pieces of turtle and backed away. Later. He’d get rid of the… stuff… later. He backed up the stairs to his apartment over the garage, watching the turtle parts with a superstitious fear that they were going to move and reassemble themselves, and let himself i
nto the apartment before he realized that he was still clutching the landlord’s hatchet. That, too, could be taken care of later. Right now he needed to figure out how to unlock the power of the ring.

  Ben pulled away and I turned towards the house. A long driveway ran beside the house and back under some ancient live oaks. A garage in this part of town virtually implied a garage apartment. Which to attempt first?

  The question was answered for me. A cloud of fireflies poured out of the back yard and down the driveway – no, a firefly’s blink is yellow. These were flickering points of blue-white light, like miniature stars, except their brightness wasn’t dimmed by the daylight. I put up one hand to catch one as they passed by, and the whole cloud slowed, contracted, became a twister-shaped funnel pouring stars into my right hand. The first touch felt a little like a very minor electric shock; then there was just a slight prickling and a sense of absorbing something vital that I hadn’t even know was missing. The edges of things around me were somehow sharper, and the minor background noise of cars and bicycles and people talking became a collection of discrete, clear sounds. And I could feel space stretching out all around me. Solar system – distant galaxies – for a moment the structure of the universe was part of me, and I was part of it, and I heard the music of the spheres.

  Then I was back on the sidewalk, on a hot May afternoon in Texas, and the points of light were no longer flowing through the air.

  I turned my hand over and looked. My cupped palm seemed to be holding a miniature cloud of sparkling little blue-white stars, all dashing around as if they were playing tag with each other. One zipped all the way to the edge of the cloud, caromed off the base of my thumb, and bounced back into the game.

  It seemed possible that these guys were all going to bounce themselves out of my hand, given a chance. I folded my palm and fingers around them and shoved my whole hand into the front pocket of my jeans before opening it again.

  They seemed to find this an acceptable playground; when I slowly withdrew my hand, there were only two little stars – sorry, I know stars are way bigger, I just don’t know what else to call the guys – clinging to the tip of my index finger. I tapped it twice against the inside of the pocket and they broke loose to join the rest of the gang.

  Now I could work on the incomprehensible noises coming from the yard behind the house. I’d been sort of aware of them while preoccupied with the stars, but since they weren’t in any language I was familiar with I’d been able to ignore them. It sounded like a foreign student from some place very far away was excited about something, and I really didn’t have time to deal with him. I needed to rescue Mr. M. The thing with the stars took longer to describe than it did to happen, but now I needed to move.

  While I was running around the house the voice kept on, and I rather thought it was trying out several different languages now. “Abatu! Anaku qatu! Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe, sonst bin ich verloren! Areeksis! Suppetiam implore! Au secours!”

  French. Thank you, Aunt Alesia. Okay, somebody wanted help, but where were they? There was nothing here but a stack of kindling and a disgusting… mess… which was not the result of somebody dropping a loaded dinner plate, as I’d first thought. There were unmistakeable pieces of turtle shell poking out among the other… stuff.

  I wasn’t the first person to throw up on it, either.

  “Vite, vite,” the voice urged me, “Espèce d’imbecile, je suis ici! Sur terre, vois-tu? On the ground, idiot!”

  I looked down at the ground as ordered, carefully not focusing on the place where I’d just tossed my cookies, and saw Mr. M.’s poor little severed head only a few inches from there.

  His beak was moving; he was cursing my slowness and stupidity. I think. Aunt Alesia’s French vocabulary – and hence, mine – does not include most of the words Mr. M. was deploying now.

  I dropped to one knee – being, yes, very careful where I put that knee. “Mr. M? We came to save you. I’m so, so sorry we were too late. Is there anything I can do for you before you, um….”

  “Finish your sentences,” Mr. M. snapped, reverting to English. And when a box turtle is feeling snappish, it can be quite impressive. “I am, quite obviously, going to do nothing until I am reunited with the rest of my body.”

  That was going to be a lengthy assembly job, and I wasn’t at all sure that something held together with Zap-a-Gap and duct tape would function enough like a body to keep him alive. “How long can you go on like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Bodiless.”

  “Oh, indefinitely,” he said. “But it is a grave humiliation for a person of my wisdom and gravitas to have to ask you mortal types to carry me everywhere. Had you only paid attention, instead of whining like little girls when I told you to cut my head off, I could have explained that after removing that thrice-accursed demonic ring you could simply hold my severed neck against the matching wound on my body. I am quite capable of doing the necessary repair work. The problem is the body. The longer you wait, the harder it is to remind it that it has to function as part of a living being. Still, you are here now. Pick me up and hold me while I reattach to my body.”

  I couldn’t refrain from a quick glance at the hodgepodge of turtle shell bits and other turtle parts. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?” Another snap of the beak.

  “Well…” I really didn’t want to show him the damage; next thing you knew, I’d be trying to find therapy for a talking turtle. Head. “The guy who took the ring did a lot of damage to your body. It’s all in little pieces. Trust me, you’re not going to be able to reanimate that!”

  “You have no idea of the full extent of my powers. Show me!”

  “All right,” I sighed. “It’s your funeral.”

  As far as the body was concerned, that was literally true. I lifted his head up and held it where first one eye, and then the other, could get a good view of the damage.

  “Isten basz!” Before I could ask, Mr. M. informed me, “That’s Hungarian, and you don’t need to know what it means. I… I think I’ll take a little nap while you find a new body for me.”

  I slipped him into my other front pocket – the one without the stars – and, being a kind and thoughtful person, removed my wallet and keys so he’d have a nice roomy space in which to nap. It wasn’t easy to get them into the back pockets, either; I like my jeans to fit.

  Ben came pounding into the yard between house and garage just as I finished rearranging everything. “Lia, are you all right? It took me forever to find a parking place, the Unitarians are hosting a debate about open carry on campus and the Baptists are having a yard sale to raise funds for lawyers to defend undocumented immigrants.” He thought that over. “Or maybe the other way around. Anyway, here you are – but where’s Mr. M. – and where’s Vern?”

  I pointed down at the ground and up at the apartment over the garage. Ben looked at the ground first and groaned. “Too late!”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “Some interesting stuff has happened since you dropped me off. We need to talk, but maybe not here?”

  It was quite a hike to Ben’s car. Mentally, I gave him points if he’d actually run all the way from his car to the apartment. I actually felt touched by the thought that he would do that just for me. Maybe Lensky was starting a new trend: Take Care of Thalia.

  Fortunately, I didn’t say anything before it dawned on me that I was merely a side-issue; he’d made that mad dash through the streets to save Mr. M.

  Chapter 10

  Ben’s plan, if you can call it that, was to drop me off at my apartment while he mooched off to his tiny place south of the river to brood on failure. However, we had things to talk about that were better discussed in the private side of the Center. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him about Mr. M. or the mini-stars while he was driving.

  He wasn’t exactly positive about the idea.

  “I won’t be able to park anywhere close, and I’m tired already.”

&
nbsp; “We need to talk,” I repeated. “On the private side.”

  “What’s so urgent about analyzing our failure?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it out here on the sidewalk, especially while we were being dive-bombed and persecuted by grackles. I was beginning to have a funny feeling about the way the blue-black devils showed up en masse whenever we had something important to talk about. Probably that was unjustified; it was May, and en masse was a pretty good description of the general grackle presence in Austin at this time of year. Still, I decided to appeal to his lower instincts.

  “We haven’t had dinner yet.”

  “Of course not, it’s too early.”

  “After we talk, I’ll order a large pepperoni pizza.”

  “With anchovies? And pineapple?”

  Ben’s instincts were even lower than I’d guessed. “Half with anchovies and pineapple. Some of it has to be left for normal people to eat.”

  “Oh, are there going to be any of those around?”

  We didn’t talk much more in the car.

  In the event, Mr. M took a very long nap, so we had an early dinner. (I kept trekking over to the secret side of the office and fishing him out of my pocket to make sure he wasn’t squashed or dead.) Ben was polishing off the last piece of anchovy-pineapple pizza and Ingrid was working on everybody’s pizza bones when I felt Mr. M moving around in my pocket.

  “Okay, guys, over to the Research Division,” I announced. “Ben, you walk Jimmy over; he’s entitled to be in on this.”

  Jimmy muttered that it was a good thing he’d had his pizza a couple of hours ago. I didn’t have much sympathy for how crossing the wall would upset his delicate stomach; he should have seen what I’d had to look at in front of Vern Trexler’s apartment.

  There were, of course, no extra chairs in my office or Ingrid’s, and it was impossible to get into Ben’s tiny office where Lensky had stacked all the chairs. Ben took the three on top of the nearest stack and set them in my office.