A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “That old nature movie was faked,” Will said.

  “Lemmings don’t actually do that,” Ingrid explained kindly.

  “Great, they’re smarter than topologists. It’s still as much as my job’s worth to let you go off like this.”

  We politely refrained from telling him exactly how much we cared about his job and his agency, even if they did supply our funding. If we abandoned Ben now, we’d be too ashamed to apply any topology ever again.

  “Look, I don’t want to go in,” said Ingrid. None of us do. But I don’t see that we have any choice. The aquarium is in the lobby. Ben is in the aquarium. And we can’t move something that literally weighs a ton, no matter how many stars we apply along with our topology. It’s just not that powerful. Right, Mr. M?”

  “I am sorry to say that you are correct.” Mr. M. hated to admit that he had any limitations. “When Nabû-kudurrī-usur desired me to move the pillars of the Great Temple of Marutuk in Babylon…”

  “You see?” I interrupted to cut off what promised to be an extended reminiscence of Mr. M.’s life as a mage of Babylon. “Even Mr. M. agrees that we can’t move the whole aquarium.”

  “Can’t you magic him out of it? Thalia got papers out of hotel room safes for me last fall. Closed and locked safes. It can’t be any harder getting a fish out of a tank!”

  “Fish,” I pointed out, “move. Constantly. And it’s not like we can get a message to Ben telling him to hold still and be rescued.” What I’d done in October involved an adaptation of the fixed-point theorem that we used for teleportation together with a couple of mappings to identify the space inside another guest’s room safe with the space inside our safe. I couldn’t do that with a moving target.

  “And even if we could get around that, a fish plus the water around him is going to be a lot heavier to move than a few papers,” Ingrid said. “How much weight can you move that way, Thalia? I top out at a couple of pounds, even with stars. That time I forgot to take the turkey out of the freezer…”

  Another reminiscence we didn’t need right now. “I don’t know. I’d need to run some experiments first. But I expect I’m in the same range as you. Water is heavy. Even working together – and that’s assuming we could synchronize – we probably wouldn’t be able to move as much water as Ben will need until we can cut the tag off him.” An unwelcome thought forced itself on me. “And there’s another experiment we really ought to try first.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve never moved a living being that way.” She knew that, she just wasn’t thinking of everything that could go wrong. That seemed to be my specialty. “It’s not just teleporting,” I reminded her. There’s this funny kind of sideways mapping we do with the 3-space coordinates. What if the mapping transformation kills him?”

  “Better that,” Will interrupted, “than leaving him to Chayyaputra’s mercies. You haven’t heard what happened to Eli.”

  I blinked. “Didn’t Ben and Jimmy rescue him too?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “There were exactly four tagged fish in the tank. We got the CEO of a startup cybersecurity company, a remarkably stupid girl who had made the mistake of laughing at Chayyaputra when he made a pass at her, a Hindu priest, and Will. Eli… was no longer in the tank. Harper told us one fish had disappeared; we just managed not to think about that until the end.”

  “Chayyaputra killed him,” Will said bitterly. “He came in one weekend in a foul mood because Logan wasn’t going out of business fast enough to please him, so he took Eli out of the tank and just – left him on the floor to die! Watched him suffering! It –" He choked. “It seemed to take forever.”

  “Did you understand what was going on?”

  “Not everything. I couldn’t seem to think clearly, or remember times before the tank. But I did know that Eli was my friend. And I knew that he was dying for the whim of that bastard – I didn’t know his name then, of course – and I couldn’t do anything to help him.” Will’s voice shook on the last words and he clamped his jaw shut, looking much older and tougher than the mild-mannered young man he’d seemed to be at first.

  “It won’t do any good for all of you to jump into Chayyaputra’s trap,” Lensky said.

  That was sort of true. We should leave at least one topologist here. Trouble was, nobody was likely to volunteer. I’d always been able to trick Ben into being the one to stay behind by pretending to toss a coin… Ben. The friend who’d stood by me when applied topology had upended my life, when even my rat of a boyfriend bailed out. My best friend ever. Something hurt deep in my chest.

  “I need to think about it all,” I said, standing up.

  “You have to think about rescuing your best friend?” Annelise burst out of Meadow’s office with blood in her eyes.

  “Annelise, it’s complicated.” I caught Ingrid’s eye and mouthed, “Meet me on the other side?”

  “It’s quite straightforward!” Annelise said. “You’re cowards. All of you!”

  I pictured a Möbius strip lying perpendicular to the doorless wall that closed off the Research Division offices, and walked along it while Annelise’s voice slowly faded. Ingrid was on my heels.

  “You’re not seriously going to give in to Lensky’s orders?” she asked as soon as I closed my office door. I supposed it was a reasonable question; I’d just been vague about my plans, and she knew about Brad and me. Everybody at the Center knew we were getting married in a few weeks. She might think I wasn’t willing to put our relationship at risk. I wasn’t too happy about that myself, but I didn’t see any alternative; not if I wanted to preserve any self-respect whatsoever.

  “Keep your voice down, you know how thin the walls are.” The conversion of the third floor of this solid Victorian mansion into office space had been done as cheaply as possible; the original walls were sturdy enough, but the new ones were about as substantial as tissue paper. Well, maybe cardboard – the thin, recycled kind they use for cereal boxes. I sank down into my desk chair and looked longingly at the whiteboard with diagrams scrawled on it, and then at the reference books on my desk. Even the crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket had a certain nostalgic appeal. Last week, the theorem I’d been trying to prove had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Now I was in a world where applied topology wouldn’t solve our problems. Not by itself. “No, of course I’m not going to let Brad stop us from rescuing Ben, but I had to get us away from him so we could make a plan, didn’t I?”

  We invited Colton to join our strategy session. Our nominal intern, Prakash, was –as usual— visiting the math department, which he planned to rejoin approximately ten seconds after the end of this semester-long sabbatical that Dr. Verrick had forced on him. A pity, that; he was actually very talented at applying topology for paranormal effects.

  The first problem became clear as soon as we started talking. No, not the problem that we were talking about teleporting ourselves into a trap; we all knew and accepted that. We’d just have to play it by ear. Mr. M. volunteered that he might be able to help protect us, but it depended on what Chayyaputra did. Even a three-thousand-year-old turtle-snake mage was somewhat daunted at the prospect of going up against a minor god. Not that he put it that way, of course.

  That first problem was - how did we think we were going to get into the lobby, where the aquarium was? You’d think that was a solved problem, given that Ben and Jimmy had been teleporting there and back for nearly a week. The trouble was, Jimmy couldn’t teleport; Ben was, obviously, out of the action; and although Ingrid and Colton had been in the building, they’d only been in Chayyaputra’s living quarters on the second floor. At first I’d thought it was simple, we could let Jimmy establish the destination space while the three of us did the heavy lifting. But the experience of seeing Ben turned into a fish had been traumatic for Jimmy; he’d turned pale green when I suggested he take us back there. Did we want to risk that his trauma would result in a side-slip to some other destination – maybe one that existed only i
n a non-metric space? That left us with only Shani’s apartment as a potential destination.

  At first, teleporting into his personal space seemed like a very, very bad idea.

  “We would have the advantage of surprise,” Colton said. “He’ll be expecting us to attack the lobby, where Ben is.”

  “Even if we do surprise him,” Ingrid said gloomily, “he thinks fast and he’s more powerful than any of us.”

  “What if we didn’t try to use applied topology, just attacked him physically? It worked for Annelise.” She and Ben had had a nasty encounter with the Master of Ravens last January, partially resolved when she discovered that the moves taught her by her self-defense instructor actually worked in real life. It had probably helped that the instructor was an ex-Mossad agent whose concept of self-defense included inflicting serious damage on the other person.

  Colton brightened. “We could take Lensky with us. Tell him to shoot the bastard immediately, while he’s surprised and before he has time to shield.”

  “You didn’t hear the argument out in the public side?” I was surprised; emotions had been hot and voices raised.

  “I was concentrating. Trying to find some topology that could be applied to transform Ben back.”

  “We don’t necessarily have to do it that way,” Ingrid said. “All the previous fish reverted to their human form as soon as Ben took that iron tag off them.”

  “I don’t think Lensky will come with us,” I said with regret. “Most of that argument you didn’t hear was him trying to order us around and forbidding anyone to even think of teleporting into the lobby of SCI. He thinks it’s a trap.”

  “It probably is,” Colton agreed. “That’s another point in favor of hitting Shani’s private quarters. He won’t be expecting us in there.” He looked at me. “Any chance you could steal Lensky’s gun?”

  “None.” When the Glock wasn’t on his person, it was in a gun safe that Mr. M. had specifically warded against paranormal tampering, with specific attention to my safe-space trick. I hadn’t objected at the time because I thought it was just an example of Lensky’s innate paranoia; when would I ever want his gun?

  Ingrid raised another point.

  “We can’t just pull Ben out of the tank with our bare hands. Didn’t you hear the measurements Jimmy estimated? It’s much too deep. For every rescue the guys took along a bunch of Harper’s supplies – all that stuff Jimmy mentioned. We won’t be able to attack Chayyaputra physically if our hands are full of junk.”

  “Bash him with the stepladder?” Colton offered.

  “Better yet, take Annelise. She’s already taken him out once.”

  “Ben will kill us if we take her into danger.”

  “Yes, well, he can’t do much to us as a fish. Maybe we can make a deal that we won’t help him transform back unless he promises not to kill us.”

  But first, we had to get Annelise on this side of the wall. And we had to get equipment. And, obviously, we had to do both those things without alerting Lensky. Who, I reflected, probably would kill us if we returned alive, so there was really no point in worrying about whatever Ben might do to us after that.

  Ingrid crossed the wall and came back with Annelise and Jimmy. “Lensky’s in his office with the door closed,” she reported. “Talking to Will, I think.”

  Probably enjoying the illusion that he’d won the argument, and avoiding us so that we couldn’t start it again.

  Annelise looked determined; Jimmy looked slightly green, and this time I don’t think it was entirely fear of Chayyaputra. Being walked along an invisible Möbius strip makes a lot of normal people feel seasick, and Jimmy was one of the worst sufferers we’d known.

  Annelise declared that she was more than willing to tackle Chayyaputra again, and added some grisly details of what she’d done to him last time that had Jimmy and Colton crossing their legs and wincing. Jimmy volunteered to drive down to Harper’s and borrow her aquarium equipment. “If she’ll lend us her key,” he said optimistically, “we can wait until the office is closed and then walk right into the lobby.”

  There was nothing to do, then, but wait and plan. We decided that Annelise and Colton would be the front line, physical troops. Ingrid and I would carry the equipment, and we would be ready to raise our super-augmented shields around all four of us if Chayyaputra seemed to be winning. And Mr. M. volunteered to ride around Annelise’s neck and deploy his ultrasonic beam to disorient Chayyaputra.

  After half an hour Ingrid went out to see if Jimmy was back yet. She came back with a cup of coffee.

  Twenty minutes later Colton checked the front room. He came back with coffee but no Jimmy.

  Ten minutes later I ran the same check. I came back with a cup of stale coffee.

  Did I mention that none of us are particularly good at waiting?

  By the time Jimmy finally returned, we were all awash in coffee and seriously jittery, not necessarily from the caffeine. “What took you so long?” Ingrid demanded.

  “Did you get the key? And where are the tools?” I wanted to know. He wasn’t exactly festooned with aquarium equipment.

  He answered the last question first. “In my car, stupid. Don’t you think Lensky would figure out what we’re planning if I showed up in the office with a stepladder and a fish net?”

  He turned to Ingrid and said, “It took so long because I had to go to Home Depot to buy everything we needed.”

  “Harper wasn’t willing to lend us her stuff?”

  “Harper,” said Jimmy, “isn’t there.”

  I assumed she was out servicing other aquariums. “When she gets home…”

  “I don’t think she’s coming back. The room she’d been renting was empty. I know because the landlady tried to rent it to me when I asked to see it – I had hoped that she’d left her equipment, but no such luck. And she’d left a note asking somebody she knew to take over her aquarium clients.”

  So, no key. We’d have to do this the topological way.

  “You think Chayyaputra got her too?”

  “He wouldn’t have given her time to write a note. No, I think she got spooked and left town. I thought she was being awfully calm about having all this magic and applied topology dumped into her lap without warning, but I guess she was just trying to keep us on the job until all the fish were rescued. She must have packed last night and taken off right after we freed Will today.”

  “Speaking of whom—”

  “We can’t add him to the rescue group unless you want to wait. He’s still talking to Lensky.”

  None of us wanted to wait, and we could hardly risk interrupting Brad to ask if Will could come out and play, so we’d have to do without his muscle. Given that we were going into Chayyaputra’s living space, there wasn’t anything to be gained by waiting; the later it got, the more likely it was that he’d be there.

  We teleported ourselves straight out of the private side of the offices to where Jimmy’s car was parked, so that Lensky wouldn’t notice us leaving. I took Annelise and Ingrid held onto Jimmy. After we collected the equipment, Jimmy argued that he should go with us.

  “No,” Ingrid said.

  “There’s a good reason,” I added. “You’re the only person here who has actually been in the lobby. If this doesn’t work, we’re going to need you to guide us there.”

  The nearest semi-private place to teleport from was the women’s room on the first floor of the Student Union. Which was actually convenient, since three of us had consumed a lot of coffee while waiting for Jimmy to get back. Ingrid went in first. We were lucky; she reported that it was empty. The rest of us trooped in, festooned with stepladder and plastic tub and other bits and pieces.

  “I hope they think we’re the janitors,” Colton muttered.

  “Relax. If anybody complains, just tell them you identify as a woman and screech, ‘How dare you assume my gender!’”

  But I noticed a plastic sign saying “Closed for Cleaning” on one side and something about “Limpieza�
�� on the other side, presumably the Spanish version. I opened the door a crack and placed it on the floor in the hall, right in front of the door. That should give us time to redistribute the equipment and form up for a group teleporting effort. With all three remaining topologists working together, carrying Annelise wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Brouwer!” I said when we were all ready.

  12. Loaded for grackle

  Austin, Thursday

  We were swept into a darkness shot through with jewel-tone colors: glowing lines, surfaces, points of light. We had time – the three of us who were topologists, anyway – for a good long look at the in-between. Too much time, really. The SCI building was less than ten miles away; we should have blinked out of the restroom and blinked into Shani Chayyaputra’s private rooms without more than a split-second glimpse of the in-between. Instead we were poised here, static, gazing at an unmoving display of lights.

  Reflexively I opened my hand and poured more stars into the transformation. I could “see” Ingrid and Colton doing the same thing; they were shadowy, insubstantial figures to my sight here, but their stars were twisting funnels of moving lights.

  Then, with a bump, we were back on the tiled floor of the restroom in the Student Union. The transition was anything but gentle. I sat down on the floor, hard. Annelise grabbed Colton’s arm and, instead of steadying herself, made him lose his balance so that the two of them hit the tiles a moment after me. Ingrid was the only one of us who kept her feet and her dignity.

  Naturally. It would be Ingrid, wouldn’t it?

  “What happened?” Annelise demanded as soon as she scrambled to her feet.

  I got up a little more slowly. I’d whacked my tailbone on those tiles. “Remind you of anything?” I asked Ingrid.

  She nodded, more slowly still. “That time when we were…” She swallowed hard and went on. “In… 1957. And we couldn’t jump back to our own time.”

  Colton nodded. “Like that, only different. That was a kind of… squishy resistance. This felt more like bouncing off something hard and being knocked back to our starting place.”