An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  18. The reflexes of the average topologist

  “I take it you’ve refueled?” I looked at the chocolate smear.

  “Nobody was telling me teleporting would do that!”

  I thought back over the few things he’d allowed me to tell him. He was right. His experiences Thursday night wouldn’t have given him any warning; even if I hadn’t had the stars, I was strong enough now to zip around campus without fainting. And the one time he’d assisted enough to sense the in-between, I’d done most of the heavy lifting. He got the exhilaration and the heightened libido, but not the exhaustion.

  “Fair enough,” I allowed. He was leaning against the bookcase, looking tired even after the doughnut fix. “Sorry about that. I don’t think any of us were expecting you to do so much this afternoon, though.”

  His face assumed my least favorite look and the one we’d seen the most of: smug superiority. “This is only what you should be expecting of cum laude M.A. from Tata Institute.”

  He was definitely not getting a set of stars any time soon, not if I had any say in the matter. He was insufferable enough without the power boost they would confer.

  And rather than going away, he seemed to have settled in comfortably with one elbow on the bookcase. “Why there is not even one chair for visitors in here?”

  “To discourage visitors,” I said, hoping he would take the hint.

  I should have remembered that Prakash was impervious to hints. In fact, impervious to just about anything short of a cast-iron skillet to the head.

  “ISA, Indian Student Association, sponsors Dil To Pagal Hai this week.”

  “Dilto pagalay? What’s that?” It sounded like some kind of exotic food, and our trip to the Indian cafe last week had exposed me to quite enough Indian cultural enrichment for now.

  “Dil, to, pagal, hai,” he said, emphasizing each word. “Meaning ‘This Heart is Crazy.’ Classic Bollywood film with Shah Rukh Khan. You should see it. Madhuri Dixit plays Pooja and Akshay Kumar plays Ajay.”

  “Never heard of any of them. Who’s…” I tried for the shortest name… “Puja?” Oops, mistake, you asked a question, he’ll never go away. You see, my reputation for surliness is undeserved; I’m actually way too polite.

  “Pooja is name of girl in film,” Prakash said. “She makes one big mistake, she accepts Ajay’s proposal and introduces him as her betrothed before she realizes that she and Rahul are meant to be together. Rahul is played by Shah Rukh Khan, long time Bollywood heart throb. Some of my friends say I look like Shah Rukh Khan, only taller. And younger, of course. You should see this film, Thalia.”

  “Um, maybe. I’ll tell Lensky about it, maybe he’ll want to stay on campus and watch it some time.” And maybe pigs would fly and grackles walk. I couldn’t see him passing up a rerun of Burn Notice for a song-and-dance spectacular. In Hindi. For that matter, I was pretty sure that watching my personal spook yell at the scriptwriters of a spy show was more entertaining than a Bollywood musical. In Hindi.

  Prakash went on pointlessly elaborating on the plot of this movie, which sounded significantly more complicated and drawn-out than – oh, than an American soap opera, or even than my last informal report on Center proceedings during fall semester. All he accomplished was to cement my decision not to bother with the film. Well, he also managed to wear out my stock of politeness.

  “I’m sure it’s a great film,” I interrupted him as he expatiated on Pooja’s epiphany about Rahul being her true soulmate, “but I want to hitch a ride with Lensky this afternoon, and he doesn’t like being kept waiting.” Two lies and one half-truth. I thought the film was probably totally sucky, and Lensky has the patience of a spook on surveillance when waiting for me. But I did want him to drive me home, that much was true; after today’s excitements, I wanted to revel in the fact that he was whole and uninjured, not spattered over the walls of Allandale House.

  “I just wanted to be with you,” I said in the car when Lensky questioned my decision. “What’s so strange about that? And why are you looking so sour? I should have thought you’d like me wanting to hang out.” Also, I’d wanted an excuse to brush off Prakash. See, I really am polite and thoughtful.

  “For one brief shining moment,” Lensky said, “I entertained the hope that the bomb scare had inspired you to be more cautious about teleporting.”

  “I ride in with you every day,” I said.

  “And teleport back.”

  “Haven’t we been over that? Your condo has to be the safest place in all of Austin. We know neither Balan nor Chayyaputra has been there, so if they want to get in they’ll have to use the door like everybody else. The locked door.”

  “All the same.”

  “Can we stop at the market?”

  “What for?”

  Being almost blown up had had an effect on my appetite. Also, I thought I should do something to compensate Pam for having stuck her with feeding an adolescent boy. “I’m cooking tonight. For us and Pam and Linda and Andy.” Taking a pot of chili over to Pam’s house would also give me an excuse to check up on Andy without making it obvious I was checking up on Andy.

  “You are cooking?”

  Look, I might not bestir myself that often, but I actually can do a little more than boil water. I just don’t like letting people find out in case they expect me to do it on a regular basis. Look at Mom; she’d cooked herself into a corner by regularly providing Dad with the best Greek food in Austin. Not to mention the best baklava in America.

  “My specialty,” I told him. “Chili and cornbread. Comfort food, perfect for a cold winter day.”

  “You call this cold?”

  Well, yes. The temperature was headed downhill from an afternoon high of 40 degrees. It would probably get down below freezing tonight. If below freezing isn’t cold, what is?

  “Oh, shut up and go charm the butcher out of three pounds of chili cut beef.”

  “And that is different from ground beef how?”

  “Oh, never mind, you can wait in the car. I won’t take long.”

  I couldn’t ask him to get any other ingredients without admitting that my “specialty” relied heavily on cornbread mix, canned beans and tomatos, and a pre-packaged “chili kit” of seasonings with instructions on the back of the package.

  The condo was frigid; he liked to turn the heat off when we left in the morning. I kept my jacket on until the place was warmed up to a livable temperature. By that time the beef was browned and I could dump everything else in and leave it to simmer.

  “You’re not planning to make the cornbread now, are you?”

  “No, I’ll do that half an hour before we eat.”

  “So why are you preheating the oven now?”

  “Because I’m freezing!”

  “Oh, come here. I’ll warm you up.”

  Our differing attitudes to cold weather were not solely based on the fact that this was the first winter Lensky had spent in a better place than DC or Jersey. Part of it was simply physiological. When he called me a wimp I pointed out that pound for pound, I had more surface area to expose to the cold than he did. He was stocky, muscular, compact; a body type that had probably evolved over centuries of Polish winters and had only been encouraged by growing up in New Jersey. Also he was considerably larger than I was.

  Sharing a bed with Lensky in the winter was kind of like cuddling up to my own personal heater, only more interesting. This evening, for instance, he thought it was funny that I dove under the duvet before even thinking about taking off anything but my shoes. But he also found it entertaining to talk me out of my clothes, one item at a time.

  I rather enjoyed that part, too.

  What with one thing and another, we didn’t get around to calling Pam and offering chili until she had already taken Linda and Andy to Sonic. Oh well, it would be just as good tomorrow, which wasn’t forecast to be any warmer. And my brief chat with Andy reassured me; he sounded as happy as could be expected.

  Of course, he was skipping sc
hool, which didn’t make me quite as happy as it did him, but I decided to worry about it another day. Tonight was devoted to celebrating the fact that both Lensky and I were still alive. And he celebrated that fact with impressive enthusiasm.

  Over a late meal of chili and cornbread, though, I started thinking about Andy’s problems again. There’d been something Colton had said…

  “Brad, did Colton Edwards talk to you this afternoon?”

  “Only when he was telling all of us about his adventure. Now that young man is a real addition to the Center staff. None of the rest of you thought that fast.”

  “Well, topologists aren’t necessarily the people you want to look at for a fast response. We’re more likely to want to sketch some examples and think about the problem at leisure, alone, without anybody bugging us.”

  “Thank God that Colton doesn’t have the reflexes of the average topologist!”

  “Agreed. We owe him. That’s why I’m so happy things worked out the way they did.”

  “You need an explanation for being happy that we weren’t all blown to bits?”

  “Well. Besides that. You know how his father and brother practically declared him an un-person when he decided to work at the Center rather than going home and applying his business degree to the family farm?”

  “I heard something, yeah.”

  I was momentarily distracted by contemplating the difference between men and women. Annelise and I had heard blow-by-blow descriptions, not to mention moaning and mourning, of every contentious interchange Colton had had with his family during last semester. He hadn’t even gone home for Christmas. Lensky and Ben had sailed past all the wrangling without giving it more than passing interest.

  “Well, it looks like the bomb has produced a happy ending for Colton. He told me his father and brother were super-impressed by seeing some of what he can actually do since starting at the Center. And he didn’t even fly! Just teleporting was enough to change their minds. Well, that and flattening some dilapidated old buildings; he let them think that was applied topology too.” I swirled a bit of cornbread in my bowl to soak up the last bit of chili. “It made me wonder… what would happen if I showed my father what I’ve been doing?”

  “Apart from rendering yourself liable to major legal penalties?”

  “Are you going to try and put Colton away for twenty years?”

  Lensky scowled at me. “No, but don’t take that as a precedent! Nobody saw him, and anyway he was saving your life. You don’t have an excuse nearly as good.”

  “Saving Andy’s life?”

  “I fail to see how your father’s having an improved attitude towards you would change Andy’s situation.”

  I had a feeling he was right.

  “And Colton incidentally saved the farm a bunch of money while he was saving all of our lives. I guess that might have had something to do with the reconciliation.”

  “You think?”

  I decided to give up thinking. “Do we have any ice cream left?”

  “I thought you were freezing!”

  I batted my eyelashes at him. “You warmed me up very well. Is there any of the cherry chocolate fudge cookie chunk?”

  Lensky made some remarks about the propensity of women to mess up perfectly good ice cream with unnecessary additives. I pointed out that I had no problem with his ascetic bowl of plain vanilla as long as I got cherry chocolate fudge cookie chunk when I wanted it.

  “Plain vanilla is more adaptable to other uses,” he said, and mentioned a use that might indeed be very interesting… come summer. There was no way I was going to let him apply ice cream to any sensitive parts in this weather.

  19. Vlad the Impaler on voicemail

  The next morning was magic.

  Weather Underground had redeemed all their previous errors by getting this one right. Overnight we'd had two inches of snow that, amazingly, didn't melt. More snow was falling now. I looked out the windows and dove back under the duvet.

  “It’s time to get up,” Lensky mumbled, throwing an arm over me.

  “Why? We’re not going anywhere. Nobody is going anywhere today.”

  “Huh?”

  “Snow,” I said.

  In Austin that one word says it all, but I was forgetting that Lensky’s idea of winter had been set in New Jersey. Not to mention D. C., Romania, and other exotic locales.

  “So?”

  “The city will be shut down. University too.”

  “You’re kidding!” He was getting more alert. I didn’t want to be alert.

  “Oh, check the Internet. Austin is closed. Nobody can go anywhere.” With, okay, the exception of research fellows at the Center for Applied Topology. But Lensky didn’t want me teleporting into the office, right? So I had as much excuse as anybody else to sleep in.

  My little cave under the duvet started to get colder as soon as Lensky removed his big, warm body. I heard him tapping on keys and muttering to himself. “City offices. Public schools. The university…. What’s wrong with you people? Haven’t you heard of snowplows?”

  I stretched and considered the advantages of getting dressed. I’d have preferred to get warm against Lensky, right here under the covers, but it seemed that wasn’t going to be an option.

  “Brad, the city doesn’t have snowplows. What we have is a couple of guys with trucks full of sand. They go around sprinkling it on overpasses and bridges until they run out. And they don’t have anywhere near enough to cover even the major roads.”

  He tapped for a few more minutes, muttering about feckless Southerners, and finally pulled on a pair of pants and padded out to the living room.

  I followed him after dressing appropriately for the weather, which involved a lot more clothes than Lensky was wearing. Leggings under my skirt, sweatshirt over the T shirt. And there’d be another layer or two if anybody forced me outside.

  The world outside our windows was strangely silent. As I’d tried to explain without actually waking up, nobody in Austin knows how to drive on snow and ice. And we don't need to learn because even an inch of snow on the ground shuts this city down.

  Lensky had laid and lit a fire in his hitherto pristine fireplace and was sitting on the carpet, leaning back against the couch, watching the flames. Outside the two tall windows flanking the fireplace, puffy white snowflakes drifted down soundlessly.

  He was still shirtless. I'm not very observant or social before the first cup of coffee, but I did notice that and appreciated the viewing pleasure. After getting coffee I came back to the living room and sat on the floor right in front of him, where I could lean back and use that well-muscled chest the way he was using the couch.

  He made a superb back rest: firm, warm, and self-adjusting. After I was settled, he put his arms around my midriff and made a couple of friendly noises that weren't quite speech and so didn't require answers. I sipped my coffee and watched the flames while I waited for the caffeine to start my brain working again.

  “I wonder what everybody else is doing?” Lensky said after I got my second cup of coffee.

  “Everybody else as in our friends and colleagues? Or as in Sandru Balan and the Master of Ravens?”

  “Oh, the first. Since everybody else is taking the day off, I’m going to give myself a day off from worrying about the bad guys.”

  “They’re probably sleeping in,” I said, “since they didn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn to explain snow days to somebody from the frozen North.”

  ***

  Annelise and Ben, both familiar with Austin, didn’t waste any time or energy checking out the list of closings; they knew what snow on the ground plus more falling out of the sky meant. What interfered with their sleeping in was Mr. M.

  “What, he didn’t take the snow as a sign that it was time to hibernate?” I asked when I heard this. Ever since October, whenever I asked him to do something he claimed I was ruining his hibernation and demanded coffee.

  “I wish,” Annelise said. “I think he finds us b
oring. And he claimed the weather was interfering with his streaming music and videos, so he wanted us to do something to entertain him.”

  I tried to restrain the grin. “What, your usual activities aren’t entertaining enough?”

  Annelise indicated that, like me, she felt somewhat uncomfortable doing that under the observation of a sarcastic, three-thousand-year-old turtle/snake mage.

  “And what’s worse,” she sighed, “he got into the coffee, and you know what he’s like then.”

  I did indeed. Hyper was an inadequate description.

  They had finally induced him to go back to sleep, but Annelise thought their means might have been a mistake.

  “We still had some of Dr. Verrick’s champagne left from the housewarming party…”

  As I remembered, at that party Mr. M. had enjoyed a saucer of champagne without becoming much more difficult than usual. “How much did it take to put him to sleep?”

  “More than he could possibly put away,” Annelise said. “Considering that he’s only a head and a neck and three feet of prosthetic snake body… where does he put it all? He killed a bottle all by himself – well, neither of us felt like drinking champagne over breakfast – and it took him a while to go to sleep. First he sang.” She shuddered. “Lia, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard him crooning ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ in that croaky voice of his. And he knows all the words! ‘Since the turtle come to Trinidad, He got the girls all goin’ mad.’” She imitated his creaky voice.

  “I don’t think that’s quite how it goes.”

  “Yes, well, he doesn’t sound much like the Andrews Sisters either.”

  ***

  Jimmy and Ingrid were similarly making the best of a snow day. So, eventually, was Colton, but he had to work harder for it. He tramped over to Meadow’s place over snow and ice, and his feet skidded out from under him twice before he remembered that he didn’t actually have to touch the slippery surface beneath him. For the rest of the way he pioneered extremely low-altitude flight, staying so close to the top layer of snow that anybody who happened to see him wouldn’t be quite sure he was flying.