A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “What were you thinking to send Thalia by herself into a nest of enemies?” he demanded as soon as they entered.

  “I was thinking of keeping her well away from Chayyaputra’s office,” Ben defended himself.

  “You know if she were here, she’d be searching his office with us,” Jimmy said.

  “The only way to keep her safe was to make sure she didn’t know about it,” Ben finished.

  Lensky actually laughed. “Fair enough. She’s tried to do the same thing to me more than once; serves her right to have her own trick played on her. But I still can’t think that being surrounded by Chayyaputra’s employees is exactly a safe situation. I’m going to pull her out tonight.”

  “What, and waste the superb cover I created for her?” Jimmy was indignant.

  “Create covers for your own girlfriend,” Lensky snapped, “keep your hands off mine!”

  But he had to admit that planting a story on the Whirred website about Thalia’s engagement to Shani Chayyaputra had been a brilliant idea. “And from all my research,” Jimmy added, “it really looks as though Chayyaputra’s employees aren’t in on whatever his scheme is. They’re all recent graduates – young, naïve – well, except for the security guy, and from all accounts he’s dumb as a box of rocks. This is the first time Chayyaputra’s been away from the office since he started operating in Austin again, and he made sure that the entire office staff would also be away at the same time, going to this retreat. That looks to me like –”

  “Somebody who doesn’t dare leave the office for fear that an inquisitive employee – or even just an overzealous one – will discover exactly what he’s up to,” Lensky finished, and nodded. “Yes. Looks like that to me too. All the same—”

  “You still want to pull Thalia out?”

  “I do. But if you’re going to continue sneaking around the SCI office—”

  “We have to. At least for the next few days.” Ben explained about the transformed fish prisoners. Lensky was momentarily distracted from worrying about Thalia.

  “That angry woman I heard screeching in the outer office was an ex-fish? What kind, a sting ray?”

  “No, she couldn’t have been that, rays are marine fish. This is a freshwater aquarium. They’re more stable than saltwater tanks, you see, because…”

  “It was a joke,” Lensky said, interrupting him. “I forgot you had a second major in Reptiles and Amphibians.”

  “Freshwater and Marine Biology,” Ben said stiffly.

  “Whatever. So… you’ve got three more fish-people to rescue, and your aquarium girl says you have to wait twenty-four hours after each transformation because turning fish back into people sucks energy out of the air and chills water.”

  “Conservation of mass and energy,” Ben said. “But there’s something wrong. I haven’t had time to work out the numbers, and anyway I don’t have before and after temperature records, but I’m intuitively sure the transformation isn’t draining anywhere near as much energy as it should to create a person-sized mass.”

  “Fine, after you figure it out you can write a paper about the relationship of classical physics to magic.”

  “Applied topology, not magic.” Why did people have so much trouble grasping the distinction?

  “Whatever! Anyway, I agree that if you’re going to be in and out of SCI all week, there’s something to be said for keeping Thalia out of the loop. All right, she can stay at the retreat for now. On one condition.”

  “What?”

  Lensky leaned forward over his desk and stared at the two of them intensely.

  “Jimmy, you need to figure out a cover for me to join that retreat as well. I want to keep an eye on Thalia and be in a position to get her out myself if she’s burned.”

  6. The imminent prospect of being unmasked

  Wimberley, Tuesday

  Tuesday at Inner Light opened with a bombshell I could well have done without. Margo Foster announced over breakfast (granola and yogurt, today, as a change from granola and skim milk) that a close friend of Shani’s, an American named Brian Lester, would be joining us at the retreat sometime today. It seemed he had come to town on an impulse to surprise Shani with a visit, and had decided he might as well spend the waiting time getting to know his friend’s employees better. Margo said she was happy to invite him as his presence would get them back to even numbers, and a lot of activities were planned for couples.

  From the cheerfulness with which Margo made this announcement, I suspected that the “close friend” was paying extra for the privilege of muscling in on the retreat. That may have done a lot for her mood, but it did nothing whatsoever for mine. This was not the kind of news that I felt able to face over granola and low-fat vanilla yogurt. I wondered if Wimberley had a doughnut shop, and if I could possibly sneak off and fortify myself with something involving chocolate and carbs. Then I wondered if I wouldn’t be wiser to just sneak off and never come back.

  I wasn’t going do that immediately, though. This morning they were actually talking over breakfast about how SCI worked, and I thought I was making some interesting connections.

  Chet and Yung-Su had started it, gloating over their stock options. It took only a couple of innocent questions to get them going on how they expected SCI to make them all rich.

  “It works like this,” Yung-Su explained. “Austin’s a fantastic place for start-up tech companies. In fact, there’s probably more innovation happening here now than in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists want to get in on the action, but it’s hard for them to judge which companies are good bets. That’s where SCI comes in.”

  “Telling the venture capitalists which company is going to be the next Google?”

  Alec laughed. “I wish! We’re not quite operating at that level. Yung-Su and I track new start-ups and evaluate them in technical terms: how useful is their idea, are they actually going to be able to produce, are their key people well thought of in the business, and who’s their competition. At the same time, Chet looks to see if their finances are sound. When we all agree on which companies are likely to be the major players in a new field, Hien takes all of our data and packages it into an interim presentation for Mr. C.”

  “Why interim? It sounds pretty complete to me.”

  “Ah, but that’s where Mr. C. works his magic. He’s got an incredible intuition for which one of the start-ups is going to pull ahead and dominate the field. Why, just a couple of months ago we evaluated two small companies that were both pushing zero-knowledge identification programs. Neither one had an algorithm ready for market, but Mr. C. put his finger on one of the firms and said, ‘This one,’ and steered his investors to it.”

  “We shouldn’t bore Sally with all the dreary details,” Yung-Su said with a smile. “Especially over breakfast.”

  “Oh, no! It’s fascinating to learn how this actually works,” I said. No lie there. “How did Shani know which company would succeed?”

  Yung-Su spread his hands. “That’s why he’s the boss and we’re the underlings, Sally. He has a gift for this sort of thing.”

  “The important part,” Chet said, “is that when he makes his recommendation, he gets part of his remuneration in stock options, and so do we. So we all stand to profit if his choice is right.”

  “And it always is!” Alec burst in. “Take those two companies I was talking about—"

  “Alec, didn’t you want to make some calls before the morning activities start?” Chet asked.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell which one was going to have the breakthrough first,” he told me. “On paper, they looked exactly even. But then the damnedest thing happened, just two weeks after PriPro got a massive cash infusion from Mr. C.’s venture capitalists. The—”

  “Alec, I hate to drag you away, but I need your advice on something,” Yung-Su said, putting one hand on Alec’s shoulder.

  Before they came back, Margo was already nipping at our heels, figuratively speaking. She was eager to line us up for t
he first activity on the day’s program, something called “Helium Stick.” So I didn’t get a chance to ask Alec what he had been going to say.

  “This exercise,” Margo said, “is a demonstration of the power of coordinated group activity. You’re going to accomplish something that people working alone could never do.”

  She herded us into two lines facing one another, standing closer together than I really wanted to stand to my opposite number – Webster. Naturally. We followed Margo’s instructions and put our hands out at waist height, then adjusted to get them all at the same level; Hien and I had to reach up, naturally, while Chet and Ginny and Yung-Su had to reach down a little. Some day I’d like to play a game that’s normalized for short people.

  “Palms down, backs up,” Margo instructed us. “Now close your hands and leave only one finger out.”

  “I know which finger I’d like to stick out,” Webster muttered. Okay, he was still a creep, but I gave him a few non-creep points for hating what looked like another touchy-feely activity. However, I noticed that he, like everybody else, used his index finger. Delete the points for not having the courage to follow through.

  After a long spiel about the magic of cooperation and group effort, Margo brought out a long cardboard tube mostly covered in holographic silver wrapping paper. A couple of rips showed the underlying brown cardboard.

  “This,” she announced, “is a magic stick. I’m going to lay it across your fingers, and then you are to lower it to the deck while keeping all your index fingers in contact under it. No grabbing the stick, no talking; you’ll have to develop a unified strategy based on body language.”

  Didn’t seem like it was going to need a whole lot of strategy; all we had to do was lower our hands to the ground without dropping the “magic stick.” That would be a lot easier for Hien and me than for beanpoles like Ginny and Yung-Su. OK, not such a bad game after all.

  Except that the stick, after she laid it on our outstretched fingers and stepped away, rose. And our hands rose with it, naturally, because we weren’t supposed to lose contact.

  “What the hell?” Webster muttered.

  “Actual helium?” Yung-Su bent and tried to peer through the hole in the tube at his end.

  “Watch it!” Chet snapped. “You’re about to lose finger contact!”

  Chagrined, Yung-Su straightened up and watched the blasted stick rise another quarter of an inch.

  “What did I say about talking?” Margo trilled in the dulcet tones of a kindergarten teacher.

  I blinked and concentrated on the silver-wrapped tube. Pictured an identical tube lying flat on the deck. Simultaneously, I pictured two glowing parallel line segments. A simple geometric function would map the top line onto the bottom one… In a non-metric space, they were identical…

  There was more weight on my fingers. I bent my knees, then knelt. Yung-Su, at the other end of the line, was having more trouble contorting his rangy limbs to get to deck level while keeping his own index fingers under the stick. It tilted slightly, then leveled off as Yung-Su and Ginny got themselves low enough. We flattened our hands on the smooth wooden planks of the deck, pulled them out from under the stick and stood up.

  “Done!” Chet announced, beaming.

  Margo wasn’t beaming. In fact, she looked distinctly sour. “That,” she said, “was not supposed to happen.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s what you told us to do,” Ginny said reproachfully.

  “Every other team that has done this exercise,” Margo said, “has seen the stick rise, and felt like it was floating, because the collective force used to keep your fingers in contact with the stick is greater than its weight. It’s supposed to be an illustration of the unexpected benefits of team cooperation.”

  “I guess,” Ginny said brightly, “we just happen to be the most cooperative team ever, because without knowing that we all lowered our hands at exactly the same rate.”

  “I… suppose so,” Margo said, sounding less than totally convinced. She took the silver-wrapped tube back.

  “What’s next?”

  What indeed. The stick game had actually distracted me for a while from the disaster heading towards me from Austin. While Margo explained the rules for the next activity, I tried out lines to explain why Shani’s close friend had never seen or heard of me.

  None of them were terribly convincing. I would have done better to be thinking up questions for the next activity. Margo made it sound like a combination of Musical Chairs and impromptu interrogation. Six people sitting on chairs in a circle, one person – “It” – standing in the middle. You ask a question of the form “Have you ever…” – it’s supposed to be something that you yourself have done – and everybody who answers “yes” has to stand up and move to another seat while you try to nab one of their chairs.

  Good enough. We started with Ginny being “It.” I hoped she’d give me a chance to lose my chair and become the interrogator; I wouldn’t be in any hurry to “win.” For me, “winning” would be the opportunity to ask as many questions as I liked. Sure, they were supposed to be questions that I myself would answer “yes” to, but as you may have noticed, I don’t mind cheating under these circumstances. The only problem would be remembering what I’d asked.

  I got lucky; Ginny started with, “Have you ever planned your own wedding?” Naturally I had to stand up for that one. They’d all heard my interminable telephone discussion with Mom last night. So, to my surprise, did Hien. I headed in the wrong direction for Hien’s chair; she grabbed mine and Ginny took hers.

  Showtime!

  I turned in a slow circle, surveying all their faces. Ginny looked brightly interested; Webster looked as if he’d found a cockroach in his morning coffee. The others were somewhere on a scale between Bored Silly and Cheerfully Cooperative. I wondered if anything ever dented Ginny’s good cheer. Ah well, not the issue at hand. Where to begin?

  “Have you ever worked on a project you had to keep secret?”

  All three of the tech people stood up. I was, carefully, too slow to get any of their chairs.

  “Have you ever identified key technical personnel for a small business?”

  Only Yung-Su and Chet stood for that one, and they switched chairs so quickly that nobody could reasonably have expected me to grab one.

  Hm, finance paired with tech. That could involve Logan’s company, Protect Your Privacy. Had that been the company competing with PriPro, the one Alec had identified as Shani’s choice? What could I ask that might shed some light on the real question?

  “Have you ever been involved with a company that unexpectedly lost key personnel?”

  No takers. Either they hadn’t been in on the assault on Protect Your Privacy, or they were lying. Well, I’d lie too, if somebody asked me if I knew anything about a murder I’d committed. Subtle, Thalia, subtle. And I needed to ask something that the non-tech staff could relate to, or they’d start grumbling.

  “Have you ever gone dancing at the Broken Spoke?”

  Everybody stood up, and they milled around so long that I had to take one of the empty seats; even I couldn’t be clumsy and slow enough to plausibly miss this opportunity. Oh well, I could sit for a while and think up better questions.

  Webster became the new “it.” He’d angled for it, just as I had; I’d seen him dawdling, changing direction, trying to look confused. That would have worked better if he hadn’t, now, looked so smugly satisfied.

  I braced for an attack, and here it came.

  “Have you ever lied to your friends and associates?”

  Nobody moved. Well I certainly wasn’t guilty here. These people were not friends or associates of mine.

  “Have you ever pretended to be someone you are not?”

  I may be a lousy liar, but even I could figure out that I had to sit tight for that one. Alec raised his hand. “Ah, does acting in a school play count?”

  When Webster nodded, both Alec and Yung-Su stood up.

  “Who
were you playing?” Ginny demanded.

  “That’s not the question format, and it’s not your turn.” Webster glared at her.

  “Oh, relax, Webby,” Hien, beside me, said. “We want to know!”

  “C-Threepio,” Alec said, grinning, “in a Star Wars parody. I had a costume made of gold-painted aluminum foil.”

  “Yung-Su?”

  “I will go to my grave,” said the tall Korean, “bearing the ghastly secret concealed in my bosom.” But his lips twitched; he wasn’t as serious as he was pretending to be.

  Ginny pouted. “I’m going to ask Margo if we can play Truth or Consequences. Then we’ll be able to grill you.”

  Webster cleared his throat and launched into a long, boring question about entering restricted areas without a security badge.

  “Webby?” I whispered to Hien.

  “He resembles a swamp creature,” she whispered back. “With webbed fingers. Don’t you think?”

  I did indeed.

  Webster, getting no response to his security badge question, moved on. “Have you ever been to India?” Maybe he’d been there during his military service? Or maybe, like me, he didn’t mind cheating.

  Alec stood up. Oh, right, he’d had that business trip to Chennai.

  Hien poked me. “Wake up, Sally!”

  Oh. Had I ever actually claimed to have been to India? I knew I’d told them I was American-born and my parents weren’t all that traditional. I couldn’t remember what else. But it was plausible that Sally Bhatia, Shani’s fiancée, would have been to India at some time, if only to meet his family. Did a god have family? Irrelevant, for now. Playing it safe, I stood up.

  Alec zipped into my chair and Webster and I competed for how slowly we could get to Alec’s empty seat. I won, naturally; I yield to no one in my talent for heading the wrong direction, walking into walls, and tripping over my own feet. And now I had some really good questions prepared.

  Unfortunately, I only got to ask one of them.

  “Have you ever profited from someone else’s disaster?”