An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

“I should have told you,” Prakash said after this. “But I did not know this about the birds then.”

  “What?”

  “Thursday night. After you went back to get our jackets? A very large grackle came out of the bushes and flew south. At the time I was only thinking strange to see one alone, but now…”

  “A spy? That would explain how the grackles knew we would be at Littlefield Fountain; I’d been wondering about that.” I stared at the poker chips stacked on my desk and brooded. “But it doesn’t explain why they brought Sandru Balan there. I would have expected Shani Chayyaputra…”

  A choking sound made me look up. Prakash looked as rigid as a statue. A dark grey statue. After a moment, just as I was beginning to think about the Heimlich maneuver, he drew a shaky breath. “Who?”

  “Shani,” I repeated, “Chayyaputra. Remember when – oh, no, you weren’t in the office Thursday, were you? We got the name from Lensky, somebody who might have been seen with Balan, and Ben and Annelise were trying to find out more when he went full Raven God on them. After he used the grackles to get into their apartment, and then to kidnap them all the way to Mumbai, it’s clear that he’s the same person as Raven Crowson and Jay Corbin. Even if the name doesn’t have anything to do with ravens this time…”

  “Oh, but it does,” Prakash breathed. “Shani dev… Thalia, he is a god. Shani, god of dark deeds and despair. Chayyaputra means ‘Son of Shadow,” and the mother of Shani is Shadow. He is a dark god and his vehicle is a large black bird.”

  “A minor god?”

  “Maybe… not so minor.”

  “An Indian god.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering why he transported Ben and Annelise to Mumbai.”

  “He has a shrine there. In a suburb…”

  “And somebody just happened to be filming a Bollywood musical using the shrine as background, which he didn’t count on and which gave our people a chance to get away.” I liked the evidence that “Shani dev” wasn’t a god on the Judeo-Christian model, omniscient and omnipotent. Apparently he could screw up.

  Prakash wasn’t all that reassured. He hovered around my desk, disbursing little bits of lore about “Shani dev” while recommending that I use extreme care in any matters relating to the god. In fact, he thought I should do nothing even remotely connected with Shani. Not likely! Oh, he had a point. Lensky had a point about Balan, too. But we’d beaten the Master of Ravens twice already, without benefit of Prakash’s theological insights. And Lensky’s nightmare about my teleporting into danger from Balan had already happened, and nobody’d been hurt.

  So far the only person who’d really suffered at the hands of these enemies had been… Colton. And it would be poor payment for his sacrifice if the rest of us huddled under the bed and did nothing about the maniacs running free in Austin.

  I was thinking about that, and nodding occasionally to Prakash, when there was an almighty thump in one of the offices down the hall.

  Last fall that would have been Colton, not flying once again.

  I felt miserable at that thought, and then jumped up at the sound of a familiar voice cursing whoever had been moving the furniture. “Colton?”

  He was sprawled in front of his own desk, looking very much the worse for wear: his hands and face were more or less clean but the skin was scorched and he lacked eyebrows, his shirt was torn and his jeans were unspeakable.

  “What happened?”

  Ben, Ingrid and Prakash were on my heels with variations on the same question. Colton stood awkwardly, wincing when he tried to put weight on his right knee. “The bomb’s all right,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just let me make a call and I’ll tell you all about it.” He fished out his cell phone and gave it a rueful look. “Broken. Ben?”

  Ben handed Colton his phone and he punched a number. “Janaelle? ‘S me. Yes, I’m okay. Back in Austin. Well, I told you… I can’t help it if Bud doesn’t believe it. Talk to you later, okay?”

  He gave the phone back to Ben. “We got any doughnuts?”

  17. The best makeout site in Floydada county

  We trooped to the break room and I started coffee while Ben blinked out to get pastry for refueling. Lensky, Meadow, Jimmy and Annelise crowded into the room, but the only one who spoke was Meadow.

  “What the [obscenity] have you been up to now, Colton, and you better [vulgar expletive] tell me the other guy looks [mild blasphemy] worse!” She grabbed his arms and silenced his mild remonstrance about her language by pulling his head down for a kiss that raised the room temperature by about fifteen degrees and was enthusiastically returned. Well, he’d been teleporting through the in-between, which did things to the libido. Not to mention, from all appearances, being nearly blown up. Which was probably as good as being shot at and missed. I don’t know what her excuse was, but the two of them were close to needing a private room.

  “Ahem.” Ben was back with us, holding a box of doughnuts.

  The lovers didn’t seem to hear him.

  He tried again. “Food? Fuel?”

  No response.

  “Chocolate,” he said.

  Colton came up for air, wrapped one arm around Meadow and reached out the other for the box of doughnuts. Ben stepped back nimbly. “Sit! Speak!”

  Colton complied with the first command, but he pulled Meadow down to sit on his knee. “I thought I might never see you again,” he said into her exuberant curls.

  “I [expletive] knew I wasn’t going to see you again,” Meadow said, with something that in anybody else would have been a sniff. But this was Meadow Melendez, the woman as immovable and unsentimental as a tank, so it must have been something else.

  Colton inhaled two chocolate-coated doughnuts while we stared at him, and then drained half the coffeepot. “Good!” he said while tilting his mug up for the last drops.

  Nobody had ever used that adjective in connection with Center coffee. Perhaps his adventures had caused brain damage.

  “Damn it, Colton, talk!”

  He leaned back, tilting his chair perilously on the two back legs. Our furniture wasn’t built for that kind of treatment from a big, husky young man. It definitely wasn’t rated for being tilted under a large young man with a woman as solid as Meadow Melendez on his lap. The chair gave a warning creak and Colton straightened up.

  “Was it a bomb?” Annelise demanded. Colton’s tattered, lightly singed appearance certainly suggested as much. “And why didn’t it blow you up?”

  “Ported back to the farm,” Colton said, making a long arm to snatch a chocolate éclair. “Not the house. Out on the west edge.”

  The western boundary of Colton’s family farm now included the house and outbuildings of a neighboring farm whose owner had been hospitalized for twenty years before he agreed to sell his land to the Edwards family. In those twenty years of neglect the farm buildings, never things of beauty to begin with, had suffered from rotten floors and sagging roofs and infestations of insects and vermin until there was no point in doing anything but tearing them down: something Colton’s father had been talking about for nearly ten years without ever getting around to it.

  “And you remembered the site well enough to teleport to it?”

  Colton gave us a slightly shamefaced grin. “Everybody in Floydada High School knows that patch of buildings. I didn’t want them torn down either, when I was in school. Behind the old barn was the best makeout site in the county. ‘Course, nobody would be using it for that on a Monday morning. I figured this time of day, there’d be nobody there to get hurt, and a bomb could only improve the old site.”

  “That was fast thinking,” I said with admiration. “Ah – what went wrong?”

  Colton looked wounded. “Nothing!”

  “Burns,” Annelise said.

  “Blisters,” Meadow added, turning one of Colton’s hands palm up.

  “Scorch marks,” said Lensky.

  “No eyebrows,” said Ingrid.
<
br />   “Really?” Colton put up one hand to check. “Ow!”

  “So what went wrong?” I demanded again.

  “Oh. Well. The bomb went off exactly on time. And it was a beauty! Turned the old barn and the hen house and the stables into piles of kindling. Even if I did get kind of scorched, I’m glad I got to see it.”

  “Please,” Lensky said, “tell me you didn’t hang around within the blast radius just to see what happened. I always thought you were the one member of the Mathematical Mafia who wasn’t actively suicidal.”

  “I’m not,” Colton assured him. “Thing is, that was the hell of a long way to jump, and there wasn’t anybody waiting for me with a box of doughnuts. I was kind of shaky and after I dropped the bomb, well, I tried to teleport just far enough back to be safe. Misjudged the distance slightly, that’s all.”

  “And then?”

  “That’s all. I dropped the thing, I skedaddled, it cleared out some buildings Dad had been talking about pulling down.”

  “All of which would have taken less than ten minutes.”

  “I was way too shaky to teleport back. Or to teleport anywhere, actually. Bud – my brother – came out in the Rover to find out what made the noise, and he had to look at all the damage for himself. Finally he gave me a ride back to the house and I talked Janaelle into fixing me something to eat so I could get back here. Didn’t want to take the time to wash up and change, I figured y’all would be worried. Kind of a pity I had to dump the bomb right away,” he said, “there are plenty of little towns around there that would only be improved by a good bomb. Trouble is, we’d need to get the people out first. Good thing about the old barn site, wasn’t nothing but a few tumbleweeds occupying it. Maybe some coyotes. No loss. In fact, saved the farm some money. Not that Bud… oh, well.”

  The room he had rented – for cash, under a false name – gave an excellent view of Allandale House. Fortunate that the Center was housed so close to the edge of the campus. Less fortunate, that someone there was cleverer than he’d thought. By ten o’clock he felt sure that the bomb was a failure. He did not make mistakes: the timer had been set to go off at half past nine, the wiring had been perfect – and with a secret fail-safe; anyone who thought he had defused it by clipping the obvious wires would have had a surprise five seconds later. Yet it hadn’t exploded early as it would have if some fool tried to defuse it; nor had it exploded at nine-thirty as scheduled. What had they done?

  He hadn’t believed in Shani Chayyaputra’s paranormal powers until the grackle spoke to him. Now he had three feathers; one for speech, one for travel, and a new one for a personal shield. And he knew from experience that the first two worked. Very well: logic said that Chayyaputra did indeed have some powers he would have scoffed at two weeks ago. Logic further dictated that someone at the Center also had powers he did not know of. That little bitch who worked with the spook could travel and shield herself. Perhaps they had found the bomb in time; perhaps she or someone else had traveled far away with it, too far for him to enjoy the explosion. That was easier to believe than that he’d erred.

  At ten o’clock he had seen the world through a red mist of anger at his failure to annihilate the Center with one blow. Later in the day he found, to his surprise, that he was relieved rather than disappointed. He had allowed Chayyaputra to push him into the bombing; that had been the real mistake. Destroying everyone at once, without warning, would not have been a satisfying revenge – especially since they’d never have known what happened to them. Better to stay with his original plan, and take them out one at a time. First some of the bitch’s friends; let her know fear. Then the girl; let the spook know despair. And last, the spook.

  Plastique was all too unwieldy a tool for the beginning of the slow, targeted revenge he intended, though he was thinking of a use for the extra material that might be even more satisfying than killing Chayyaputra. But for the start, he would need something he hadn’t brought with him, because it would have been inconvenient to travel with it. A call from a burner phone solved that little difficulty. His preferred tool would be shipped to him overnight, broken down into parts and packed very carefully so that he wouldn’t have to sight it in again.

  For the rest of that afternoon – much of it, anyway – Prakash displayed an impressive ability to concentrate. He had evidently decided to apply himself seriously to the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem as a key to teleportation. I knew because he kept teleporting into my office, effectively destroying my concentration.

  “Pick another destination next time,” I told him the third time he stepped out of the air in front of my desk.

  “It is a limitation,” he said, “being able to travel to known places only. Is there not some way to bypass this?”

  “There is one thing that has sometimes worked,” I said, repressing but you’re too egotistical to be able to use it. “Sometimes you can teleport to a person. But it has to be somebody you know very well and feel very close to. For instance, I once teleported to Lensky without knowing his location. But that was an emergency.”

  Prakash stared at the window behind me as though memorizing it, turned sideways and vanished.

  “What did I tell you about picking a different destination?” I snarled five minutes later. This time he’d materialized between my desk chair and the window. Impressive precision, assuming that was what he was aiming for, but why couldn’t he pester Ingrid for a change? “Ingrid’s office,” I said. “Ben’s office. Better yet, the supply closet!” Not being quite actively homicidal, I did not recommend that he teleport into Dr. Verrick’s office.

  “I am not remembering how those places look,” he said. “I am remembering your office only, isn’t it?”

  “Well, go and look at some other place!” I was trying to use TopoCAD to sketch the topological construct Ingrid and Colton had used for their spectacular flying swoops, and since their description hadn’t included the parameters this program wanted, I was making a mess of the sketch. Prakash’s incursions were not helping.

  He actually left me alone for well over an hour after that; long enough for me to admit that it wasn’t entirely his fault I couldn’t draw the thing, much less visualize it in a way that the stars could power. Colton’s adventures had left me disgracefully wobbly. I kept seeing the central room in shambles, with little bits of Lensky and me and everybody else spattered on what remained of the walls.

  Not the kind of thing I wanted to visualize. I decided to calm myself by some simple imaging: a Möbius strip, a few simple three-manifolds, things like that.

  Instead, I found myself listening to Colton, who had been on the phone most of the afternoon. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he sounded cheerful. So he couldn’t have been talking to his family, could he?

  Well, yes he could, and now he stepped out of the air in front of my desk. I started a really good snarl before I registered that it was Colton, not Prakash.

  “Oh, did I interrupt you?” he said. “Sorry. I just needed to tell someone. Annelise is doing a doughnut run, and Meadow’s taken Mr. M. off to the engineering labs to tinker with his latest augmentation.”

  “A doughnut run this late?” I said, momentarily distracted. It was almost four.

  “Prakash,” Colton said. “He’s worn himself out teleporting around the office. Hasn’t he been in here? I’ve had him twice while I was on the phone, and Ingrid threw a paperweight at him the last time he interrupted her.”

  “Did she hit him?”

  “No,” Colton said, “fortunately he teleported out of there just before it landed.”

  That was Colton being nice again. I thought it regrettable that Prakash hadn’t paid a price for being such a nuisance.

  “He’s pretty wiped out now,” Colton commented. “Do you think we should give him a set of the stars?”

  No.

  Oh, well. At least he was being a nuisance legitimately, in the pursuit of research and understanding, rather than wasting all our time telling us that we cou
ldn’t do what we had done.

  “Was that what you came to tell me?”

  “Oh, no.” Reminded of his news, Colton beamed at me. “I’ve been talking to Bud. He’s decided that whatever I’m doing here is worthwhile after all. I’m not sure,” he added, “whether it was me disappearing and then calling Janaelle from here hours before he thought I should have reached Austin, or all the money I saved the farm by demolishing those old buildings. But I… didn’t mention to him that the demolition was actually the work of a bomb. If he gives me credit for doing it with topological magic, so much the better. I’m in good with the family again!”

  “Mmm. Tell you what, though, if you’re taking credit, you’d better get to work on finding a way to do it topologically. He may want you to repeat the trick.”

  Colton wilted slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that. What do you think would work to blow up a building?”

  I confessed that nothing occurred to me offhand, and suggested he consult with Ben, who was the most ingenious of us at finding new applications. “And if you think of something, try it without stars first,” I added. “I don’t want to try and explain to the Allandale House trustees how we happened to destroy part of their building.”

  Colton glanced at his watch. “It’s late, anyway. I’ll get with him first thing tomorrow, if I don’t think of anything tonight. And we’ll work outside!”

  “Don’t concentrate so hard you get frostbitten!”

  “In Austin?”

  A good point. It was cold, and the Weather Underground was predicting snow flurries, but that was unsupported optimism. We hadn’t seen snow in Austin since my sophomore year, and it hadn’t stuck to the ground then. (The city and university shut down anyway. The roads might have been icy.)

  I was stacking my notes and reference books, preparing to go home – well, to Lensky’s via a stop at Pam’s to see Andy – when Prakash stepped out of the air again. His chiseled features were slightly less intimidating with glazed sugar on his lips and a smear of chocolate on one cheek.