Thaumatology 101

by Teasdale, Niall

  ‘You’re not still working are you?’ Lily asked.

  Ceri glanced over. Her friend was still laid back with her eyes closed. ‘Yes, so?’

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ Lily said, ‘you’re supposed to have the weekend off. You’ve had your nose in that book all weekend.’

  ‘I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with Tennant’s containment system,’ Ceri replied as if this was justification enough. ‘There’s an error in the synchronisation algorithms for the particle accelerators.

  ‘Error in the syncopation, huh?’ Ceri giggled; Lily was not that dumb. ‘I thought you were doing quantum thaumatology, not music theory.’

  ‘Can’t find no T-Null if you don’t got that beat,’ Ceri said.

  Lily opened one eye, regarding Ceri with a raised eyebrow. ‘Seriously, hun, you’re too geeky to be “down with the hood.”’

  Ceri pouted. ‘It’s just a tiny modification to the frequency distribution,’ she said seriously, ‘I’m amazed they haven’t noticed it before.’

  ‘Maybe her other assistant worked on that part,’ Lily suggested. ‘You said yourself his work was sloppy.’

  It was true; Doctor Tennant’s other assistant was a postgrad named Shane Walters and he had the same instinctive grasp of thaumatology theorem that a fish had for paragliding. Walters hated her. He had had Tennant’s undivided attention for two years and now there was a smarter rival, who had understood the entire system in four days, to contend with. His animosity was almost palpable. ‘I kind of hope it wasn’t him,’ she said, though she did not think Tennant would have made the mistake.

  ‘Shane the Pain still bugging you?’

  Ceri grunted in response and finished annotating the equations in her notebook. Lily was right, she should forget about it and relax. She put the book down and turned onto her front. ‘Would you put some oil on my back?’ she asked.

  There was a soft creak from the wooden-framed lounger. ‘Sure,’ Lily said settling herself beside Ceri’s hips. Delicate fingers untied the strings around Ceri’s neck, then her back, laying the ties aside. The same fingers, slim, but strong, began to massage oil into Ceri’s shoulders. She let out a sigh and relaxed onto the lounger. Lily’s skin was smooth against hers; slick with the oil, the fingers slid over her shoulders and back, working down to her hips in slow, looping strokes. The hands stopped at the waistband of her briefs and Lily shifted down the lounger a bit.

  Having oil put on the soles of her feet tickled a bit and Ceri giggled before Lily moved up to her ankles and started working up her calves, strong fingers pressing the muscles. As the hands reached Ceri’s knees her legs parted slightly, more or less automatically, allowing Lily’s long fingers to slide over the skin of her inner thighs, up to smooth oil into her buttocks and then, slowly, to slide back down…

  Ceri’s body went suddenly rigid as she felt the tingle start in her wrists. There was a sudden gasp so feint that she was unsure she had really heard it and then the creak of the other lounger taking weight. The tingling faded again and Ceri tried to relax once more, feeling foolish and irritated. ‘Sorry,’ she said, turning her head to look over at her friend.

  ‘I… should have more self-control,’ Lily replied, waving the apology away.

  That was the problem, right there, the one source of tension in the house, except when someone spilled something on the carpet and Twill had a hissy fit. Ceri was quite secure in her belief that she liked guys, but gay men had made passes at Lily. The girl was sex on legs and anyone who was not physically frigid was attracted to her. In turn, Lily liked Ceri as a friend and her succubus side tended to think that any friend was a sex partner. But sex with a succubus was more than physical pleasure, and Ceri’s sigils perceived the effect as a threat. Ceri was not really sure what would happen to Lily if they ever slipped, but as it was they had to keep their hands to themselves, and sometimes they forgot.

  There was a slightly uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Ceri had found the best way to deal with the situation was to stay quiet and let Lily’s hormones calm down. It was not just that Lily occasionally lacked self-control. They had made a deal; Ceri would not let herself get into a position where Lily’s baser instincts kicked in, Lily would try to keep herself from straying. When they slipped, they both felt guilty.

  ‘So,’ Lily said to break the silence, ‘you really think you’ll crack it? The thaumiton thing?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Ceri replied.

  ‘But it’s a really big deal, right?’ Lily pressed. ‘People have been looking to prove this T-Null stuff for years?’

  ‘Since nineteen-ninety-seven,’ Ceri mumbled into her arms. That had been when the Quantum Thaumatology Department at Cambridge had published their paper on Quantum Magic and Gravity, proposing the existence of a gauge boson similar to a graviton referred to as a “Null Thaumiton” or a T-Null. The existence of positive and negative thaumitons, T-Plus and T-Minus, had been known for years, but no one had ever managed to explain where they came from, or why they had increased in abundance following the Shattering. The Cambridge team had, at least, proposed a solution for the origin question, but there was no experimental evidence to prove it.

  ‘Tennant’s rep will go through the roof if she beats Cambridge to it, right?’ Lily said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Ceri said, ‘she’ll basically be able to write her own research cheques.’

  ‘And the assistant who helps her crack her synchronisation problem?’

  ‘Well, I’ll get my name on the paper when it’s published,’ Ceri replied, blandly.

  ‘Oh come on!’ Lily said. ‘It’s the biggest prize in thaumatology! Show some enthusiasm.’

  Ceri’s head lifted from her arms and she grinned across at Lily. ‘I’m enthusiastic,’ she said, ‘I just don’t feel the need to bounce up and down like a demented Jack-in-the-Box to do it.’

  Lily did not even open her eyes. ‘I don’t bounce,’ she said. ‘I’m far too firm for bouncing.’

  Holloway, August 30th

  The High-energy Thaumatology Building was a grand title for a small, reinforced concrete annexe on the Metropolitan University’s north campus. It was not really that what they did there was dangerous, it was more that people thought that they might do something dangerous.

  The person who ran the place was Doctor Cheryl Tennant, tall, thin, and attractive in a slightly waspish MILF sort of way. She almost never smiled and was noted for treating anyone less smart than herself, which was almost everyone, like an idiot. Her red hair matched her almost legendary temper. Ceri almost felt sorry for her co-assistant researcher.

  ‘Quite how this went unnoticed in your work for so long when Miss Brent spotted it within a week is beyond me!’ Tennant was saying while Shane Walters contemplated his desk rather closely. ‘I believe with these changes we should be on the road to a functional system.’ Her glare moved away from him, and Shane fixed Ceri with a glare of his own. Okay, so she did not feel very sorry for him. ‘Miss Brent, please change the synchronisation algorithms,’ Tennant continued as she stalked out of the small office the two assistants shared. ‘Mister Walters, prepare the circle.’

  Shane stood up and circled around his desk toward Ceri’s. He glanced up to check that the Doctor was gone before speaking in a low growl. ‘You’re her favourite now, newt, but you’ll screw up eventually. Watch your back.’ He slumped out to work on the lab’s containment circle.

  Ceri decided that she did not actually feel sorry for Shane at all. He was a big man with a slightly bulbous nose. He looked like he had learned to stoop to make himself look smaller and could not stop. He was not particularly good looking, but not particularly ugly. His hair was a sandy blond and cropped short, and he usually carried what he maybe thought was designer stubble. He was not especially bright, and the only reason he was there, really, was that he had some talent at wizardry. That was why he was handling the circle preparation, though Ceri was fairly sure she could have done a better job at that too. It was also why he
felt he could call her a “newt,” it was a derogatory term for normal people who could not work magic.

  Standing up, she headed out into the laboratory, bracing herself against the slight sting in her wrists. They had been trying to crack the T-Null problem for two years now and the lab radiated thaumitons like an old-style nuclear reactor gave off gamma rays.

  Tennant was in the cage containing the banks of recording computers scavenged from every old project she could acquire them from. Around the walls of the room were further banks of equipment; huge capacitors designed to pump out big surges of power into the four thaumic accelerators, along with an array of control systems designed to synchronise the pulses and control the circle resonance oscillators.

  Carved into a granite slab in the middle of the room was the circle itself. Ceri knew the basic design well; her father had cut a similar one into a similar slab in one of the basement rooms of High Towers, though the one there was more complex and had different symbology. It was a double ring around a north-facing pentagram; a containment circle with barrier runes cut between the inner and outer ring. Traditional demon summoning circles used a south-facing pentagram, but this one was designed simply to stop anything passing from one side of the circle to the other. Around it, on the floor, were a series of coils made of copper around a silver-iron alloy core. These would induce resonance effects in the circle’s barrier field, synchronised with the particle accelerators. Right in the centre of the circle stood a sensor array connected through to the external data connectors via an infra-red laser transmitter. Cables would have disrupted the circle, but light was fine.

  Moving to one of the computer screens around the wall, Ceri began altering the coding for the frequency distributions of the accelerators while Shane busied himself pouring carefully measured quantities of sea salt into the inscribed pentagram, then the inner circle, then the runes.

  He waited, his foot tapping impatiently. The final circle would not be prepared until they were ready, and that meant waiting for Ceri to finish her part. She blanked him out, concentrating on the complex sequence of modulations required and working methodically through the code until she was happy that she had corrected Shane’s numerous mistakes. It occurred to her that some of them were so stupid that it almost appeared he had made them on purpose. Shrugging, she closed the file, compiled the software, checked the results, and then hit the button to distribute the new executable to the four driver processors. Micro-channel enchantment processors were partially magical in nature and programming them, while nothing to do with magic as such, required a degree of intuition which Shane appeared to lack.

  ‘Ready, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here and monitor the accelerator outputs.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Tennant beamed. ‘I have a good feeling about this. Mister Walters, let’s get started.’ She began to start up the recording equipment in preparation. Small, red lights on cameras around the room switched on. Other, more esoteric, devices began to hum.

  Shane moved to the northern point of the pentagram and began to lay a line of salt along the outer carved circle. Once that was done, he would invoke it creating a column of magical energy from which nothing much larger than an oxygen molecule could escape, and the only thing larger than that which could enter was Shane. If he crossed the line, however, the circle would be broken. That would be a bad thing if the experiment worked. If it worked, the circle was going to contain huge amounts of magical energy.

  There was no way a minor practitioner like Shane could normally close a circle as big as this one. Ceri’s father could have done it, she thought rather proudly, but Shane needed some help. At a nod from Tennant, the big man took up a metal rod from a nearby table and pointed it at the circle. His eyes closed as he concentrated on projecting the stored energy in the wand and Ceri clenched her fists, turning to her computer screen, as her wrists reacted to the surge of energy.

  ‘Initiating resonance inducers,’ Tennant called out from the cage. The coils began to hum and the tingling in Ceri’s wrists increased in intensity. Something felt off and she glanced over her shoulder.

  Normally the circle would be invisible to the naked eye. Those with the Sight could see it she had been told, but not norms. Now, under the effects of the resonance coils, it was a shimmering cascade of light, spinning ever faster until it became a solid, white, glowing cylinder extending from the ceiling down to just beneath the granite floor. Nothing seemed out of place.

  ‘Initiating pulse generators,’ Tennant said, and Ceri turned back to her screen. She could hear the excitement in the doctor’s voice. It was infectious.

  Readouts flowed across her screen as the capacitors began to unload into the generators. She felt them fire at the same time as the readouts indicated they had. Her eyes watched the displays, looking for any tell-tale signs of error. ‘Looks good!’ She yelled over the now very loud hum of machinery.

  ‘Yes!’ She heard Tennant’s cry of triumph over the noise. ‘I think we’ve even got recombination! It’s…’

  Ceri’s wrists burned hot. Something was definitely not right. She turned, glancing first at the cage where Tennant was looking suddenly horrified, and then at the circle. An arc of white light, like a solar flare, was pushing out from the surface toward her. She started to move, but it was like the world had suddenly gone into slow motion as the brilliant jet of thaumic particles streamed slowly out and hit her.

  She heard someone screaming and suspected it was her, but the pain in her wrists was so extreme that that was all she could think about. She saw bright flashes of light amid cascading waves of colour. Behind her the computer exploded, throwing her forward to slam into the white wall of the circle. Her arms had gone numb and she could smell something like burning fabric as her shirt melted. It felt like someone had plugged her into the mains and it came as a blessed relief when everything finally went black.

  Denmark Hill, September 2nd

  There was a fairly universal sense of grey. Ceri blinked, trying to resolve the room into something with some degree of detail, and managed only to work out that there was little detail to resolve. Her left hand ached slightly and the backs of both her hands felt tight, like there was something taped on, pulling the skin. She glanced down. Sure enough, there was a needle stuck in her left hand, attached via a tube and drip feed to a saline bag hung beside the bed. On her right hand she could see a lump of some kind, the detail of it indistinct in the dim light, but it was glowing slightly. The dull green was something of a relief; her mother had used an amulet just like that to keep an eye on her when she was a baby.

  Looking around, she spotted Lily sitting across the room, reading a magazine by the light from a small lamp. It looked like a magic-powered model and Ceri’s slightly foggy brain began making sense of things. She was in a magical isolation room, probably in King’s; they had the best treatment facilities in southern England. She opened her mouth to say something, and managed a cough. At least it had the desired effect; Lily was on her feet beside the bed before her magazine flopped onto the tiles.

  ‘You’re awake then,’ the half-succubus said, taking a glass of water from the small cabinet beside the bed and helping Ceri drink from it. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Um…’ Ceri took mental stock of herself. Her forearms were wrapped in thick bandages and there was the needle in her hand, but basically she felt fine. ‘Actually, I feel pretty good.’

  ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Lily said dryly, ‘and still the right shape.’

  ‘What happened to my arms?’ Ceri asked.

  Lily grimaced. ‘Second degree burns,’ she said. ‘Your tats. Stopped the blasts from turning you into a fish, but it looks like it hurt like hell. You’ve been in here three days, it’s Thursday. Oh, and I’m sorry about this, but…’ Reaching down, she grabbed the amulet on Ceri’s hand and yanked it off. Immediately the light went out; somewhere, probably at the nurses’ station, a similar amulet had gone dark.

  ‘Ouch,’ Ceri whined.

/>   ‘Baby,’ Lily replied, grinning. The relief on her face and in her body language was obvious. ‘When you were brought in here you were frying anything electronic they brought near you. They told me to pull the charm off you when you woke, and the nurse would be in to…’

  The door of the room opened, the nurse’s hand going to the main room lights and then stopping as she saw Lily standing by the bed and Ceri half sat up in it. ‘Back with us then?’ the nurse said, her voice carrying a slight Scottish accent. ‘I’ll page Doctor Looper.’ She backed out, closing the door, and Ceri noticed the grill over the window. It was likely made of silver-iron alloy and designed to screen the ward beyond from whatever was within.

  ‘How hot was I?’ Ceri croaked.

  ‘They didn’t tell me the figures,’ Lily said, forcing Ceri to have another sip of water, ‘but it was a real rush being in here with you, and I even had to lie a bit to get them to let me stay.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I said we were, y’know, partners,’ Lily replied.

  ‘Why?’ Ceri looked blankly at her.

  ‘I was worried about you, ‘kay? Only way they’d let me stay was if I said I was your next of kin.’ The half-demon actually looked embarrassed.

  ‘And because the thaumic radiation just made her rather happy,’ said a voice from behind them. ‘Did you fib about your relationship with Miss Brent, Miss Carpenter?’ The door closed behind a pleasant-looking man in his sixties wearing a white coat and half-spectacles, and clutching a wooden box. ‘Shame on you.’

  ‘Actually,’ Ceri said, ‘she is listed as my next of kin.’

  ‘I am?!’ Lily blinked.

  ‘The closest blood relative I have is Great-aunt Branwen,’ Ceri said, ‘and she’s ninety, and living in Wales, and mad. The university prefers having an emergency contact who knows my parents are dead, and that I’m female… and not a sheep.’

  Looper chuckled and put his wooden box on the bed beside Ceri. ‘Go on,’ he said, shooing Lily away. ‘You know the drill by now. Go get Miss Brent a coffee or something.’ Lily giggled and headed for the door, Looper waiting for her to leave and close the door before he opened the box.