An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “One of the jets…” It sounded like something right out of one of Annelise’s wilder flights of fantasy, but she sounded completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing. I tried to wrap my head around the concept that “Daddy” was an order of magnitude richer than I’d imagined.

  Anybody who could snap his fingers and have his daughter picked out of a Mumbai suburb and flown back to America probably had ways of getting around Customs and Immigration too. I decided I didn’t even want to know about that.

  “Well, it was thoughtful of you to come straight back here from the airport. We were getting worried about you two.”

  Annelise blushed. “Well… not that thoughtful. Actually I wanted to borrow Mr. M. If Creepo-puta busted into our apartment once he might do it again, and…”

  Mr. M. indicated his willingness to guard the apartment while Annelise and Ben recovered. He slipped out of my belt and rode off around Annelise’s shoulders, resting his little turtle head right over the black lace that peeped out above her wrap.

  “I intend to deal with them individually.”

  “Fine. Start with the girl Annelise and her boyfriend. I owe them a little extra attention.”

  “You will allow me to select my own targets.”

  “Within reason.”

  “Very well, let us leave it to chance. Let Lamashtu watch their office, and let her tell me whenever one of the mages is alone. I need to take them when the other mages cannot help them… one or two at a time, as I said… let their fear build.”

  10. Intoxicated by your touch

  I hadn’t seen Prakash all day, so I texted him to learn if he was still up for an unofficial work session this evening. While waiting for an answer, I went over to the Student Union and grabbed a hamburger. Teleporting around the university was no longer much of a strain for me, but it was only sensible to make sure I didn’t start the evening hungry.

  I was debating being extra-sensible with a piece of cherry pie when he texted that he would be there in ten. OK, no pie. If we actually did enough work tonight for me to need a refill, I’d just have to raid Lensky’s refrigerator. I stepped out of the Union to teleport back but there were still too many people around for privacy, so I had to walk the short distance back to the office. I even climbed the stairs; there weren’t any witnesses inside Allandale House, but I had promised Lensky I wouldn’t teleport to work until the matter of Balan was settled.

  Prakash was waiting for me when I went through the wall. Actually sitting in my office, behind my desk, looking through one of my math books! His jacket was slung over the back of my chair. OK, he’d found a fourth way to be annoying: invading my personal space.

  He looked up and gave me what I had to admit was a rather dazzling smile. “Thalia! I was afraid you had decided not to come.”

  “I texted you,” I pointed out. “Are you ready to start?”

  He pushed my chair back and came around my desk. “Never more ready,” he purred, and tried to put an arm around me. I saw it coming and teleported two feet back before he touched me.

  “To start work,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “It is not work to be alone with a beautiful girl.” He moved in again, this time with both arms out, and I teleported to behind my desk. He looked confused. “Why you are running away? You were wishing me here to meet you, isn’t it?”

  Damn Lensky! He’d been absolutely right. And Prakash had now come up with a fifth way to be annoying. “I asked you to meet me here so we could both concentrate,” I said. “Now it’s your choice. Keep chasing me around the desk, and I’ll be out of here before you know it. Settle down to work on the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, and I’m here to help you. Which will it be?”

  He almost pouted. It wasn’t a good look on a man in his late twenties, no matter how handsome. “I do not understand women.”

  “Clearly. I hope you’re better with topology.”

  He heaved a weary sigh and pulled up a chair for himself. “Any continuous function sending a compact convex set onto itself contains at least one fixed point,” he rattled off. “This is very basic theorem, Thalia. I understand it already, probably better than you. If that is level on which you are working, you cannot teach me anything new.”

  “Stick around a few minutes. Do me a favor: visualize an example of that theorem in your math space. Think – oh, think about two planes. Crumple up the top one and let it touch the bottom one at just one point.”

  He shrugged, but his eyes drifted up and to the right and he didn’t, for once, say anything.

  “Now replace the bottom plane with an image of where you are right now, and the top with an image of – oh, say, your own office – and let yourself be the point in common.”

  He blinked hard, but nothing else happened.

  “That should have moved you from here to your office.” And what a blessing that would be. “Look, it works like this.” I blinked and teleported to the hall just outside my office door.

  He turned in his chair and clapped his hands. “Very cool trick, Thalia. Do you have the rest of the floor set up like this? Holographic projections? Mirrors?”

  I stepped forward, put my hand on his shoulder, and teleported both of us into Ingrid’s office.

  “I have to give you credit, you must have spent long time preparing this. You did not have to work so hard to spend time with me, Thalia. I am happy to meet you here without any magic tricks.”

  “What would it take to convince you that I really am teleporting us?”

  “Nothing, because I know that it is not possible. You are only playing hard to get, and it is a waste of time since you were already arranging to be alone with me. We both know what is the score, isn’t it?”

  “We do not.” I was beginning to suspect he was using the pretense of flirtation as just another way to avoid the mathematical reality before him. “Look, if you think I’m just doing some kind of sleight-of-hand and it’s all done with previously set up mirrors and projectors, how about we do it somewhere else? Let’s go outdoors. Walk to a place of your choosing – as long as it’s out of sight of passers-by – and I will teleport both of us to a second place of your choosing. I can’t possibly have prepared the entire city for ‘smoke and mirrors’ effects, no?”

  Dammit, now I was starting to talk like him.

  “That is sweet. Oh yes, Thalia, I will like to be alone with you in a dark place, but outside is too cold, no? Let us stay here and be comfortable.”

  “Believe me, your virtue is perfectly safe with me. Your life, on the other hand…”

  “Oooh, I am so afraid!”

  “You should be,” I said between gritted teeth. I grabbed his elbow and jumped both of us, fast and hard, to a place between a cluster of shrubs and the front door of Allandale House. “Since you wouldn’t pick a starting point, I have. Now where shall we go?”

  Prakash gasped. “How you are doing that?”

  “I told you. Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “How do you think we got here?”

  “Obviously we came down the stairs. I must have been too intoxicated by your touch to resist you. But Thalia, it is cold. Can we not go back inside now?”

  It was a bit chilly, even for me, but I was determined to make my point. “First pick a place for us to teleport to. I can take us any place that I’ve seen before. That would include most of the Drag north of MLK, the West Mall, the South Mall… it just has to be some place without a whole lot of people around.”

  “After we do this, we can go back indoors?”

  “Sure.”

  Prakash gave his humoring-the-idiot-female sigh again. “Very well. I choose… that miniature Albert Memorial place.”

  “Littlefield Fountain?”

  “Yes. Now let us go inside. I am freezing!”

  “Good choice. It’s unmistakable and unforgettable. Which side of the fountain? I presume, given how much you’re whining about a chilly night, you would rather I didn’t
take you right into the middle of the water.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “When two people are teleporting together, it’s a good idea to make sure they’re both on the same page.”

  Another elaborate sigh. “All right. The east side, by the statue of the naked man in the tin hat. But I am not going anywhere without my jacket.”

  “Whine, whine, whine. OK, I’ll get our jackets.”

  A quick round trip to and from the office should have taken essentially no time at all, but I was held up by looking in the wrong place for Prakash’s jacket; I’d forgotten that he’d hung it over my desk chair while he was trying to take over my personal space. I had a sweatshirt hanging off a hook in my office, emergency supply for the days when a blue norther dropped the temperature twenty degrees in twenty minutes, and I took a moment to tug it over my head. It wasn’t all that cold, but I was beginning to feel that it would be wise to wear multiple layers of clothing around Prakash the Octopus.

  He was standing with his shoulders hunched and his arms wrapped around himself when I got back, and he complained about how long I’d taken, but he was still there. I thought that maybe one tiny part of him actually wanted to be convinced.

  As soon as he put his jacket on I took his elbow again and put my free hand into my pocket. The stars fizzed and danced against my palm. “Ok, it will help if you can hold those images in your head, the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem and the east side of Littlefield Fountain.” I didn’t feel quite as much drag this time as I had when I whisked us outside; perhaps he was helping a bit. Still, having him along slowed me so that even with the power of the stars helping, I had just time to blink at the colors and shapes and exhilarating movement of sliding through the in-between.

  We came through right beside the statue, and the first thing I registered was a cloud of grackles forming a column of black feathers beside Prakash.

  “Oh, shit!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Grackles.”

  That was as far as I got before Sandru Balan stepped out of the cloud of grackles. I tried to jump both Prakash and me backwards and raise a shield around us, but I wasn’t quick enough. Balan wound up with an arm around Prakash’s throat; I wound up two steps away inside a shield that was not going to do Prakash any good at all.

  11. Liar, liar…

  The explosion of the gun was deafening, but my shield held up beautifully. The bullet’s energy made me take a couple of steps back, that was all, when it bounced off my shield and vanished into darkness.

  “No magic tricks!” Balan said. To Prakash, not to me. “If I suddenly find myself somewhere else the first thing I’ll do is shoot you. And I’ll do the same if your little friend there suddenly disappears.” Now he looked at me. “If you want him to live, you’ll do exactly as I tell you. You can begin by dropping your protective wall.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. “What makes you think I have some kind of protection? You missed, that’s all.”

  In answer, Balan moved the barrel of his gun, fired at me again and swung it back to Prakash’s head. This bullet, like its predecessor, bounced harmlessly off my shield. A faint clang suggested that the ricochet had carried it into one of the bronze sculptures of the fountain this time.

  “That’s noisy,” I observed. “Do it a few more times and I wonder how much of a crowd you’ll draw?” Not much, on a cold Thursday night far away from any student residences, but maybe he didn’t know that.

  “Drop the wall or I kill this one!” he repeated angrily.

  I eased my closed fists out of my pockets. Riemann surfaces. The picture was bright inside my head, but I held it still so as not to start anything too soon. “You won’t shoot him. If you do, you have no other leverage against me.”

  “Thalia, run!” Prakash burst out. “Don’t mind me, save yourself!”

  He must not have grasped what Balan had, that I was quite safe as long as I maintained the shield.

  “Oh, hell, no,” I told him. “And don’t interrupt me again.” It was tricky, holding the image of the covered sphere that shielded me while I simultaneously built Ben’s Riemann surface in another part of my math space. Fortunately I didn’t have to juggle the visualizations for long. I just wanted to be sure I was completely ready to implement Riemann before I dropped my shield to do so.

  “I don’t have to kill him,” Blondie said. “I think it will suffice if I shatter his elbow. That should impress upon you the importance of cooperating before I have to destroy another joint.”

  The pistol moved. So did I, opening my closed hands and releasing a brilliant cloud of stars that covered Balan’s face. At the same time I mentally moved my chosen points on the Riemann surface to converge on one point a couple of feet in front of me.

  His pants burst into flames. He dropped the pistol and Prakash to slap at the flames. I grabbed Prakash, replaced the fire algorithm with the Brouwer image and brought us back to the top floor of Allandale House. It was somewhat more taxing than the journey out, because I had carelessly thrown all my stars at Balan’s face and had none left to feed into the visualization. I had to make this jump the old-fashioned way, on nothing more than my personal power, and Prakash weighed me down. The jump was long and slow and painful. I felt as if a piece of my soul was being pulled out while Prakash and I traversed arcs and spiraled down in dimensions that shouldn’t exist.

  Then, just as I was losing momentum at a sharp vertex, I felt some other power pushing me forward. Prakash became light as a feather. Another heartbeat’s worth of moving lights and we hit the floor in Allandale House.

  I mean that literally. Teleporting someone else with you makes for a tricky landing; unless you started off with both of you standing and balanced, you tended to fall out of the in-between. Somehow topologists in pairs never are that balanced.

  We scrambled to our feet and stared at each other. For the first time Prakash was actually looking into my eyes instead of over my head. “It’s real,” he breathed.

  “You felt it? The in-between?”

  His hands were shaking. “I – I used it! The Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem. It works – it really works.”

  A first visualization, in the middle of a frightening escape, with no pre-planning! Dr. Verrick’s intuition had been right; once he allowed himself to believe that what we did was real, Prakash had the potential to be a superb research fellow.

  All that flickered through my mind for examination later. Right now I too was shaking. Zipping through the in-between has interesting side effects, such as raising your heart beat and making you dizzy. It also affects the libido.

  So, I discovered, does being shot at and missed. Just as Lensky always claimed.

  The palm of my open hand prickled; the stars were returning. Prakash stared at the cloud of flashing blue-white pinpoints funneling themselves into my hand

  “You saved my life,” Prakash said. “I have never met a woman like you. There is no other woman like you.”

  “Actually, Ingrid is almost as good with teleportation…”

  He grabbed me around the waist and bent me backwards for a prolonged kiss. He was much stronger than I was, but his manhandling hardly encouraged me to direct my heightened libido towards him. I stood perfectly still and waited for the idiot to finish.

  Then, when it began to seem he was never going to let go, I contemplated using Riemann surfaces for a second time tonight. He released me just in time to save his beautifully tailored pants from igniting.

  “If you’re quite through?” I said, backing away.

  He looked puzzled. “How you can be so cold? After what we have been through together? It is Fate. Our lives are forever linked.”

  I laughed outright. “Oh, get over yourself. I’ve been through worse. With better men.” With one much better man, to be specific. “Go home, eat something, get some sleep.”

  “At least let me drive you home. It is cold outside. You should not walk.”

  It might take him a lit
tle while to wrap his head around our special abilities. “I don’t have to, remember? Now go home. Tomorrow we start serious work.” I turned sideways and vanished.

  “After this fiasco, I begin to doubt your usefulness.”

  Balan began to think about ways to kill Chayyaputra. Slowly. No one lectured Sandru Balan!

  “You have every advantage. My servants spy for you and transport you. And yet you cannot even kill two unarmed people!”

  Chayyaputra seemed angrier than this one incident justified. Maybe something else was bothering him.

  “They have something else, something you did not tell me about! The girl put an invisible wall between us.”

  “Ah. I cannot give you the power to break down that wall, but I can give you the ability to raise a wall of your own. Not that you will need it… but here.”

  An iridescent, blue-black feather appeared in Chayyaputra’s hand. Scowling, Balan took it and added it to the two feathers he already held.

  “Try not to lose it.”

  He would not kill Chayyaputra just yet. Not until he fully understood the man’s powers. Besides, after the initial reluctance, he was funding Balan’s revenge lavishly – or had been.

  “Initially I did not object to your piecemeal approach. But it seems you are finding it more difficult than you thought to target them. Let us forget half measures.”