An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  The blur disappeared and a moment later somebody slammed the window down, mercifully dampening most of the musical croaking.

  Ben and I teleported up to the third floor of Allandale House without discussion and without worrying about witnesses, dragging Lensky and Annelise with us. We found Jimmy standing over Ingrid and pressing a red-stained paper towel to her shoulder. A moment later Colton clumped out of the bathroom with a wild look in his eyes. “Doesn’t this place have a first-aid kit?”

  “My desk, bottom right-hand drawer,” said Annelise.

  While Annelise did things with liquids and bandages, Ingrid groused at Colton. “And we could have carried on, too.” She seemed to have got the last song stuck in her memory. “Ow! That stings!”

  “Hold still!”

  “But you were too scared of somebody shooting at something he couldn’t even see! Ouch! Annelise, you’re not scrubbing a floor!”

  “Seems like a reasonable thing to be afraid of,” Ben said.

  “I didn’t turn back because I was afraid of getting shot,” Colton said. “Not exactly. I was more afraid of what Jimmy would do to me if I didn’t bring you back in one piece.”

  Annelise told Ingrid not to be a baby, and assured the rest of us that the only damage she’d suffered was a long graze on her upper arm. It did not surprise me to learn that Annelise’s father had insisted she take a first-aid class as well as learning self-defense from an ex-Mossad agent. Clearly a sensible man, he hadn’t counted on the university to teach her anything useful.

  The grackle battle had been a joint effort. Colton did Flight, Ingrid did Camouflage and threw stars, and Mr. M., wrapped around Ingrid’s waist, deployed his new augmentation to spread shock and awe among the grackles.

  They hadn’t had anyone to do Shield.

  “So what’s the new weapon, Mr. M?”

  “Narrow beam lasers,” Mr. M. said from Annelise’s desk after he slithered off Ingrid. “Quadruple lasers, on retractable gimbal mounts.” He extruded the tiny lasers on their mounts and painted dancing lines of light on the far wall.

  Meadow had really outdone herself this time.

  “What powers the lasers?” Jimmy asked.

  Mr. M. sank limply down onto the desk. “Coffee,” he said in a broken whisper, “I need coffee…”

  21. A surrender with honor

  Prakash got to play teacher that afternoon, showing us how he’d combined teleportation and camouflage into a single, fiendishly complex visualization. It wasn’t easy to replicate. Every time one of us attempted and failed, I could sense his ego swelling. By the end of the day he was all but unbearable.

  By then Ben, Ingrid and I were all able to teleport short distances and arrive inside Camouflage. Colton was still struggling with the visualization, but I suspected he was going to stay until midnight if that’s what it took to get it right. Combining these two paranormal effects was going to be extremely useful; teleporting within Camouflage removed the risk of being noticed when we stepped out of the air at our destination.

  “I told you he could make a valuable contribution to the Center,” Dr. Verrick said as he left for the day.

  He took the stairs one at a time, cautiously. Any of us could have whisked him down to the first floor. But when Ben first hinted at that option, Dr. Verrick had made caustic comments about Boy Scouts helping little old ladies across the street.

  I think we all dreaded the day when he could no longer get up the stairs to the third floor on his own. Would he let us assist him then?

  Maybe it would never happen. In theory everybody got older, but in practice Dr. Verrick seemed to have achieved stasis at… seventy? Ninety? A hundred and ten? Today he looked exactly as old, and walked exactly as cautiously, as he had when I was in the first year of Honors Topology.

  Oh, well; we’d just have to burn that bridge when we came to it.

  I rode home with Lensky, having burnt a lot of energy in the Grackle Battle and the subsequent hands-on tutorial. I may have said something to that effect to him; he detoured past Mandola’s and loaded up on things like grilled chicken and sliced provolone and fresh-baked ciabatta.

  “Do you think that’ll keep you alive until dinner?” he asked as I built a sandwich out of these ingredients.

  “I thought this was dinner,” I said, somewhat inelegantly, through a mouthful of sandwich.

  “I want something hot,” Lensky said. “We’ll go out later. Always assuming the entire city doesn’t shut down on account of nasty-looking dark clouds, or a sprinkle of rain, or whatever.”

  He was really having a hard time with Austin’s attitude towards snow and ice.

  “In that case,” I said after I’d inhaled most of the sandwich, “maybe I’ll just take an hour and drop in on the family.”

  Lensky’s eyes narrowed. “It’s Wednesday.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “You never visit your family except for the obligatory Friday night dinner, and not then if you have the shadow of an excuse. And you never go without half an hour of grousing and grumbling first.”

  “I’m worried about Andy.” We’d been keeping in phone contact, and he sounded remarkably contented with his situation. As for Pam, she insisted she was delighted to give house room to this tall, handsome boy. But he couldn’t just stay there, conquering the higher levels of his video games and missing school. Could he?

  “And you’ve figured out how to reconcile him with your father?” One blond eyebrow tilted up.

  “I haven’t thought of any way to use my abilities to improve the profits of a dry cleaning business, if that’s what you mean. I may just have to depend on shock and awe. Like Mr. M. with his new lasers.”

  Lensky studied my face. “It was being shot at, wasn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Ever since lunchtime you’ve had that weird, jumpy energy going, like somebody who’s just been in a firefight.”

  He might have a point there. Certainly I’d hardly started to refuel when I started feeling an urge to go somewhere and do something. And I’d had an idea about Dad’s shouting. Why had I taken what he said at face value? There were other interpretations…

  “I’ll drive you,” he said.

  “No! I mean – you don’t have to; I can teleport easily.”

  “You mean, you still don’t want to introduce me to your family.”

  “Well, right now,” I said cautiously, “that wouldn’t be a good idea, would it? Once they know about you, all they’d have to do to locate Pam would be to look up “Lensky” in the phone book. Also, I might have to break a few little rules about non-disclosure, and it’s better if you don’t actually witness that.”

  Lensky rubbed the back of his neck. “By ‘break a few little rules,’ I take it you plan to tear the agreements you signed into little pieces and stomp on them. All right. I’ll stay in the car. That way I won’t have to know what you’re doing. And then we can go on to Asti, if that’s okay with you.”

  The part about him waiting outside wasn’t totally satisfactory, but it seemed like the best deal I was going to get. And the prospect of a dark Belgian beer with dinner at Asti sweetened the pot. I grabbed my shoulder bag, dropped in my secret weapon and the document I’d printed out this afternoon, and shrugged on my jacket.

  The shortage of street parking places in my parents’ neighborhood forced Lensky to wait nearly half a block away. So much the better. I just might be able to pull this off without letting my two worlds meet. I strolled down the sidewalk, swinging my shoulder bag and projecting – I hoped – calm and competence.

  Mom was just clearing away dinner when I came in. She fluttered about heating something for me and I persuaded her not to bother without actually saying that I was being taken out to Asti later. Which would have invited questions about who was taking me and why I didn’t bring him in to meet them and so on and so on. Sometimes it’s a pain and a half keeping my family and friends separated.

  Before Mom whisked them away I
saw that there were two empty bottles of Lone Star beside Dad. So the one he was working on was likely his third beer. Good, that should mellow him a bit.

  “If you’re going to talk about that worthless boy,” he growled as I sat down opposite him, “don’t bother.”

  Mom blinked back tears and took refuge in the kitchen.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said airily, leaning back and crossing my legs. “I quite understand that you don’t care whether he’s ruining his life by dropping out of school.”

  “His choice.”

  “Or whether he’s hanging out with a bad crowd because he’s desperate.”

  “His home is here and he can come back when he’s ready to beg my pardon.”

  “Or whether he has enough to eat….”

  Mom surged out of the kitchen like a force of nature. “Panagia mou! Yanni, I want to know about my little boy!”

  “Too bad,” I said, though I had to clench my fists under the table to keep acting blasé. “Dad’s disowned Andy. Didn’t you hear? He doesn’t want us to talk about him.”

  Dad’s hands squeezed the beer bottle until I thought it would break. All his knuckles stood out, white against the ropy muscles of his hands.

  “I just stopped by to invite Dad to a friendly game of cards.” I pulled the deck out of my purse and riffled the edges of the cards with my thumb. “Pilotta?”

  Dad’s eyes brightened at the sight of the cards. He was deadly at Pilotta and preferred the two-handed version so that, as he put it, “I don’t have to put up with my stupid partner’s mistakes.”

  “Just to make it interesting,” I said, “why don’t we play for a little wager?”

  His eyes brightened even more. Mom interjected a note of warning. “Yanni, playing cards for money is gambling.”

  “Well, we won’t play for money, so that’s all right. I was thinking, just a quick game, three rounds; if Dad wins, I’ll tell you where Andy is.”

  “Yanni, do it!”

  “And if I win, Dad will promise to let Andy come back without making a scene. And furthermore he’ll never verbally abuse him again.”

  “What does that mean? You college kids with your funny words,” Dad grumbled. But his fingers were twitching with desire for the cards.

  I looked him straight in the eye. “You know what it means, Dad. It means you stop telling him that he’s not manly enough, stop calling him a faggot because he doesn’t have a girlfriend yet, stop calling him a wimp because he doesn’t want to go out for football and doesn’t get in fights, stop telling him the Marines will never look at him. Is that clear enough, or do I need to write out a contract for you to sign?”

  “Hah! You don’t need to write a contract, little girl, because you’re not going to win. Deal!”

  I shuffled and gave Dad and myself each six cards, then flipped one face-up on the table.

  “Seven of hearts. Do you accept the trump suit?”

  “I do.”

  I dealt each of us three more cards and the game was on in earnest. Mom had, unprompted, sat down with paper and pencil to keep score.

  “Sequence,” Dad grunted, and showed the seven, eight, and nine of clubs.

  “Carre.” I had four tens.

  He scowled and I glanced over to make sure Mom recorded my points.

  At the end of that round he was ever so slightly ahead, because I didn’t want to come on too strong and make him suspicious. Yes, of course I was cheating; there’s no way I could beat Dad at Pilotta without cheating. The trick was to make him believe the game was on the level. I stretched and yawned. “I’ve almost forgotten how to play. Getting it back now, though.”

  “Huh. You never played so good when you were living here,” Dad grumbled.

  “Well, I have been studying mathematics for six years now,” I said demurely. “No wonder I’m better at counting cards.”

  Dad shuffled the deck. “Play! We’ll see how much good your college book learning does against a man of experience.”

  I won the second round by a healthy margin, enough to inspire Dad to pointed remarks about how I might not do so well if I weren’t playing with my own deck.

  “The cards aren’t marked,” I said cheerfully, “but by all means bring out your own deck if it makes you feel better.” The beauty of cheating by my methods was that it didn’t matter what cards we used. Remember, I’d been practicing small object manipulation while Colton and Ingrid went for showy stuff like flying. I could see through the backs of the cards and I could influence which cards were dealt. It wasn’t perfect; Dad still scored plenty of points, and of course, I needed to let him do that so he wouldn’t be suspicious. But it was good enough to give me the necessary edge.

  I totally trounced him in the third round, and it was so much fun it should have been illegal. Wait, maybe it was; I had been cheating, after all.

  “I don’t believe it,” Dad fulminated. “I don’t believe it. You been practicing with your fancy college friends, Thalia?” He hadn’t even waited for Mom to add up the tricks; he knew he was beaten.

  “I guess mathematics is more useful than you thought,” I said. And so it was; without applied topology I wouldn’t have been able to cheat nearly so effectively. “Sign here.” I pulled out the slightly crumpled document I’d printed that afternoon. It was nothing more than I’d said I wanted at first: just a promise that Dad would stop abusing Andy in any of the named ways.

  Dad grabbed the paper and crumpled it in his fist. “I do not need to sign. I am a man, I have honor, I pay my debts. Tell the boy he can come home.” His fingers mashed and shredded the paper and he looked almost uncertain. “Will he?”

  “I’ll tell him what you said.” I couldn’t really promise more than that; it was totally Andy’s decision whether he’d take a chance on Dad honoring his word. I thought he could; once I got over the automatic cowering reflex that Dad’s raised voice caused, I’d begun to suspect that he was hurting much more than he admitted over Andy’s defection. The card game hadn’t really been about bullying him into no more bullying; it had been a way for him to climb down.

  With honor.

  22. Your very, very short future

  On one level, he was enjoying this game of strike and counter-strike. He didn’t know all the topologists’ abilities, but then, they didn’t know all of his. How long could they continue countering his attacks? Not forever. They would have to win every time. He only needed to win once.

  On another level, he was getting frustrated. He was not in the habit of losing, and on Wednesday he’d lost two battles at once. Someone among the topologists was evidently powerful enough to shield all of them against bullets. And the grackles, although not completely evicted from the trees around Allandale House, had suffered enough to drastically reduce the number of willing spies he could command.

  It was time, he thought, to end the game. He was not getting paid for this, and there was a potentially lucrative contract awaiting him in Minneapolis if he got there in time.

  He spent Thursday morning in painstaking preparation for his final stroke, including setting the grackles to tell him the girl’s movements each day. He already knew that sometimes she disappeared from the office before the man drove home, and he had deduced that she was teleporting herself to his place. All he needed was one such occasion, and he would be able to take a full and satisfying revenge.

  The chance came earlier than he’d hoped, almost as soon as his materials were prepared.

  Thursday was a nice quiet day. I buttonholed Ingrid before Prakash got in and asked her to teach him the basics of Flight. That kept him out of my hair all day and gave me a chance to talk over the results of the card game with Andy. I’d anticipated that he would be reluctant to take a chance on Dad keeping his word, but he was easier to persuade than I’d dared hope. He was only sixteen; he wanted to go home as much as my parents wanted him there.

  Once again, though, he insisted on doing this by himself. “If I hide behind you, Thalia, what do
I do when you leave?” He went home Thursday night and I spent the evening biting my nails until I got a text: “All OK here. You coming tomorrow?”

  Ah, the Friday night dinner and disparagement gala at our parents’ house. I would have preferred to get my teeth cleaned. But I couldn’t duck out of the gathering this week; I needed to see how Andy and Dad were interacting and whether things actually were better.

  Friday at the Center appeared designed to shake my belief that anything and everything, up to and including surgery without anesthesia, was preferable to the Friday night family dinner. First, the grackles were back. There weren’t as many of them as there had been, but they made up for it with increased aggressiveness. On the way into Allandale House I had to duck and pull my jacket over my head to ward off their beaks and claws, and when I reached the third floor the windows were black with cackling grackles.

  “Alamo Bird Services claimed they wouldn’t return to a spot they’d been chased out of for over a year,” I groused. “How come Mr. M.’s laser attack only discouraged them for one day?”

  “We’ll just have to do it again,” Ingrid sighed, “with noisemakers as well as lasers.”

  Mr. M. brightened. “Cannon! I need cannon! And torpedos, and flash-bangs, and Tomahawk missiles!”

  Clearly he’d been streaming too many war movies. I left Meadow to talk him down to an augmentation she could actually build, and retreated to my office to devote some serious thought to Prakash’s teleport-and-camouflage trick. Was it something we could generalize to other paired visualizations? Teleport-and-shield would be handy. How would I do that?

  It was hard to concentrate with grackles tapping at the window and crapping on the balcony. That might have been the problem, or it might have been simply that I was in over my head mathematically. The way Prakash combined teleporting and camouflage depended on a topological construction I hadn’t been familiar with. He did know more math than I did, I had to admit that. Given that he was an ABD – All But Dissertation – and I’d stopped with a bachelor’s, it would have been surprising if he didn’t.