“Should I look?” she asks with a cringe.
“Not if ye be a lover of frogs,” I answer.
We keep the soup bowls closed and focus on our rice, which turns out to be the best rice I’ve ever eaten in my life. Or maybe I’m just hungry, and happy that it’s clean and pure and frog free.
Just as we’re finishing up, Clath comes busting into the restaurant like the building is on fire. She looks relieved when she sees us and runs to our table
Sitting in the chair next to Justine, she catches her breath. “You girls,” she says, shaking her head. “Unbelievable.”
Unable to tell whether she’s impressed or angry, I put my spoon down and take a sip of tea. She just keeps shaking her head. Assuming the worst, I say, “So you think we totally missed the mark?”
“Missed it?” she says, holding up Justine’s teacup to the waiter to indicate another. “You blew me away. No offense to either of you, but when we first met I wasn’t expecting much. Now I’m very, very impressed.”
It’s always hard to accept a compliment after a low blow, but we both manage to say thanks.
“I just can’t believe no one else has thought of this as an option for the meaning of that symbol,” she says, shaking her head. “To come up with such a simple yet elegant solution is just … well … brilliant.”
“Wow, that means a lot coming from you,” I say, pouring some tea into the cup that our toothless little friend has brought for her.
“I did some serious Internet searching after I read it, looking for others who have made this connection, but it’s never been made. You two have come up with a completely original solution for that symbol.”
I want to give Papers credit where credit is due, but it just seems way too farfetched.
“If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, though,” Justine says.
“Absolutely. Which is why I’m amazed no one else has thought of it,” Clath answers, drinking her tea in one gulp. “As a mathematician, I’ve worked with tori for decades, but even I had not heard that DNA and the heart both work in a toridal fashion. I’d never had a reason to even investigate the tori in relation to biology.”
I fill up her cup again, and again she drinks it in one gulp. Her esophagus must be made of stainless steel.
“Waves. It’s all just waves,” she says as she sets down the empty cup. “Even this china teacup that looks so solid. See, the torus, or the tasty donut as you refer to it, is the only structure in a world of waves that can become coherent and be able to nest inside each other. So yeah, it makes perfect sense that the torus is the underlying energetic structure of the universe.”
I look over at Justine, who is folding a sugar packet into a tiny fan. Obviously she is as nervous as I am that Clath will find out that we don’t know much more about toruses—tori—than that one-page paper we just wrote.
“So where to next?” I ask, changing the subject. “Where should we go next on our learning tour?”
“We’ll spend a full day tomorrow at the caves, get the most out of the place, then I’ve got this friend I think we need to see. He’s at a think tank outside of Cambridge, so we can chalk it up to looking at some Three Hares symbols in Great Britain.”
“What’s he thinking about?” Justine asks.
“How to get out of his tank?” I reply.
“Stick to symbol analysis,” she says dryly. “Clearly that’s where your talents lie.”
I slide my bowl of soup to her. “Hungry?” I ask. “I haven’t touched it.”
When she lifts the lid I brace myself for a scream that doesn’t come. I look over to see that the contents of the soup have settled to the bottom so it just looks like a bowl of broth.
“Maybe just a bit,” she says as she picks it up with both hands and sips.
We look at each other, both biting hard on our lips. Justine motions to the door with her head so I set down enough money for the meal and say, “Well, we better hop on back to the room. We’ll pack up—let us know when you want to leave.”
Clath takes one more big sip, then sets the bowl down. “I’ll go too,” she says, refilling her teacup and then gulping it down. “Something odd about that soup.”
On the way back upstairs, Clath says she’s off to do a bit more exploring. “Care to join?” she asks as we leave her at her door.
“I think we’re going to do a bit more research,” Justine says. “You know, about the theory.”
“Of course, yes,” Clath says, now taking us completely seriously.
Back in the room, I call up the secret website Alex and I made. Justine and I bask in the tone of the day while looking at the Daylord and number, Ten Ik.
“No surprise that we came up with a totally genius decoding today,” Justine says. “The Daylord Ik means it’s a mental, agile day that’s good for communication.”
“And Ten means it’s a day of manifestation.”
The site makes me think of Alex. Of our time together in the tower. “I really need to get ahold of Alex,” I tell Justine.
“We can’t risk it. Remember what Uncle Li said? No contact.”
“But if we’re going to England, we’re going to be right there. He could meet us.”
“We don’t even know exactly where we’re going,” Justine says.
“But we know we’ll be outside of Cambridge. Let’s just see where the nearest Three Hares symbol is.”
I look up the closest example of the Three Hares to Cambridge. “Look, here’s one in a church in Long Melford, which is pretty close.”
“So how do you get Alex there?”
“I don’t know.” I bite down on a yellow pencil until my teeth sink completely in, which is freakishly satisfying. Then a brilliant idea floats into my head. “We’ll fly him there!”
“How?” Justine asks.
I hop onto a travel site and look at fares to Cambridge. “I’ll create an account in Alex’s name, book travel, then email it to his account. No one would ever know it was from me.”
“And he’ll just go? Without any explanation?”
“I think so. I hope so. Let me just find the closest hotel to this church that the Three Hares is in. I’ll book him there for three days from now. That will give us all time to get there.”
I find a flight and room at an inn near the church, pay with the PayPal account that Bolon gave me, then hit send. Alex doesn’t know I can’t contact him directly, but he’s smart enough to know that if he gets a plane ticket with no explanation, it’s got to be from me.
“Done and done,” I say, turning off my laptop.
“So are you excited to see Alex?” Justine asks.
I flop back on my bed and stare at the ceiling, wondering how it’s even possible for dust to collect on a ceiling. “Let’s just say tomorrow is gonna drag like a thousand days,” I reply.
“Caves, caves, caves,” she sighs. “Like can anything top a Maglev ride to Atala?”
“Nothing short of a stairway to heaven.”
––––––
We suffer through another full day of tours with Wen, which under any other circumstances would have been super fascinating. But all I can think of is seeing Alex and finally being able to talk to him about what is going on.
At the end of a long day, we board the plane. Marco greets us with ice-cold sodas and a snack. I’ve never been so happy to see a Ritz cracker in all my life. The airplane food we have on the way is better than anything I’ve eaten since I left Mrs. Findlay’s cooking.
Clath has taken quite a liking to Mr. Papers and starts playing some sort of math game with him on the airplane. It involves two origami dice with a bunch of sides on them. Clath writes numbers on each of the sides and then they roll the dice and add them or something. I don’t try to follow but it’s fun to watch from across the aisle. You can tell Clath is totally enchanted by Mr. P.
Because of time zones, we fly backward in time and land in Cambridge only a couple hours later than when we left China, even th
ough twelve hours have gone by.
We don’t even drop our bags at a hotel, just pick up a car and go straight to meet Clath’s friend. You’d think that she would dress up a bit, but no. She wears a T-shirt that says “Mathlete” tucked into her trademark elastic-waist jeans, and has so many fingerprints on her glasses you wonder how she can even see.
TWENTY-THREE
We pass the campus of the incredible Cambridge University, possibly the coolest-looking university in the world. I’m hoping Clath’s friend’s think tank will be in one of the gothic-spired buildings, and am disappointed when we drive beyond the campus to the city. After some terrifying city driving by Clath, we arrived at a nondescript ’60s-looking two-story building. Clath parks and leads us down a side staircase to a basement door. There is no sign, just the number 64 etched on the door.
“What do these people do again?” I whisper as Clath knocks on the glass.
“Serious research,” she answers cryptically.
The door creaks open to reveal a jowly man with wiry white hair on both his head and his earlobes, wearing a checkered button-down and a pea-green sweater. He’s the classic English researchy guy.
“Clath, my dear!” the man says, holding out his hand. “Lovely to see you!”
Professor Clath offers her hand and says, “The pleasure is all mine, Professor.”
We’re introduced to Emmet Davis, and find out he’s a professor emeritus—which I think means retired—at Cambridge. His specialty was systems theory and now, Clath tells us with a flourish, he’s working on a “toe.”
“A toe?” I ask, looking around the room at an array of computers and servers that even my dad would be impressed by.
“Shorthand for a Theory of Everything, dear,” Professor Davis says with a tea-stained smile.
“I didn’t know you could have a Theory of Everything,” Justine says.
“It’s the holy grail of science!” Clath says, like we’re idiots. “To unify all the forces of the universe and be able to express it simply and elegantly as a single model!”
“Any luck with it?” I ask Professor Davis. Clath throws me a look. Now we’ve both embarrassed her and we haven’t even gotten past the doorway.
“Getting closer,” he answers. “But where are my manners? Come in, please! Have a seat and I’ll get us some tea and biscuits.”
Not wanting to give the man a heart attack, I point to the soft carrier on my shoulder. “I have a … monkey,” I say. “Should I leave him in the car?”
“Good lord, no,” Professor Davis says. “Let the poor chap stay. Only a scant difference in our DNA, in any case. Please, sit. I’ll just be a moment.”
Justine and I settle onto an old couch with a coverlet on it while Clath takes a tattered armchair off to the side. The coffee table is stacked with technical magazines and notebooks.
“Does he live here?” I whisper to Clath.
She shakes her head. “He’s actually terribly wealthy. Lives in an estate a few miles away.”
“Very British,” Justine says. “You can never tell who is loaded.”
Professor Davis walks back in with a tea tray and sets it down on the stack of magazines. It sits crookedly and I worry it will fall, but he seems totally unconcerned.
“Well then,” he says once we’ve each been served a cup of tea and a cookie. “What is it you girls are hiding?”
I take a big gulp of tea. “Excuse me?” I say. Justine just looks at me with her big eyes, then looks toward the door as if to say, Let’s run!
“At your age you don’t just arrive at Dunhuang, take one look at the caves, and then write up a document relating the Three Hares symbol to a unified field theory based on the torus,” Professor Davis says.
“Is that what we did?” I ask. Clath and Professor Davis look at me like I’m popping off. “Seriously, I’m not being glib!”
“Yes,” says Clath. “That is what you did.”
“Take me through your thinking,” Professor Davis says.
I have to think fast in order to leave out the part about Mr. Papers spinning the photo and making the origami hearts and stars. Instead I tell them that I once saw this program on feng shui that said that form defines energy, so I looked at the form to see what the underlying energy would be.
“But then how did you know to connect that to the heart, and to DNA?” Professor Davis asks.
“Lots of Googling and a little luck,” Justine says, taking the pressure off me. “Why, are we in some kind of trouble?”
“Not trouble, exactly,” Clath says, then pauses. “I’m just trying to understand what you’re doing—I sense there’s another motive in your coming to La Escuala Bohemia.”
“There’s no motive; we’re just interested in symbols. And myths,” I reply.
Both Emmet and Clath are looking hard at us, like we’re a piece of modern art that they’re trying to figure out. I try not to break out in a sweat, try to remain calm and not let on that we’re hiding anything.
“And then there’s the matter of the monkey,” Clath adds.
“Whatever do you mean?” the professor asks, looking at Mr. Papers, who is sitting quietly beside me.
“He can read math formulas! The little thing can reason—and communicate through origami.”
“Rubbish!” Professor Davis says. “Folding paper is one thing, but recognizing math formulas is simply not possible for a Capuchin.”
“I’ll show you!” Clath says, taking a piece of paper from his desk. She writes down the equation that was on her shirt when we left for China and hands it to Mr. Papers. I can’t stop chanting no, no, no in my head. I don’t want him to show off.
Mr. Papers gives the equation a glance and then folds the paper into the absolute simplest airplane possible and sends it sailing through the air. When it lands in Clath’s mess of curls, he squawks and jumps up and down a little like a four-year-old would, making himself look a bit like an idiot. I can’t help but smile at his acting.
Clath calmly pulls the paper airplane from her hair and crumples it in a ball.
“Impressive,” Professor Davis says with a laugh. Clath looks pissed.
Justine breaks the tension, asking Professor Davis, “Can you tell us what’s so interesting about our theory that the Three Hares is a hidden symbol of the torus?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s completely unique. The correlation has never been made before you two. Symbols are not really my area, you see, but if this is actually what the Three Hares represents, then it could boost my work a bit. You see, I’m working on a formula that shows that all things, from the smallest particle to the largest system, work on the same gyromagnetic equation.”
“You lost me at ‘gyro,’” I say.
“He’s talking about spin, about the torus,” Clath says impatiently.
“Yes. You see, microscopic electrons and black holes move in exactly the same way—they have the same gyromagnetic ratio. Extraordinary, really.”
“Extraordinary is an understatement,” Clath says.
“So Hermes Trismegistus was right with the whole As above, so below thing?” I ask.
He nods. “That which happens at the smallest level, also happens at the largest.”
“So can you tie this all together for us?” I ask.
“You see, I am swimming upstream with my theory. Those in academia want to find a unified field theory that works within the constraints of what we already know. Big bang, ever-expanding universe, Einstein’s theory of relativity and all that. But I assert that all systems, from the smallest proton to the largest galaxy, work on the same principal: spin. It is spin that creates magnetism, gravity, etcetera. Come, look here,” he says, walking over to his computer. He pulls up a 3D model of a donut-shaped torus and then makes it move so we see the outer skin moving up and then going down the inner hole and coming back up the outside edges.
“It’s like breathing; the inhale, or contraction, is going down into the center and exhale, or radiation, is c
oming out of the hole and up. It’s all a matter of poles—like two ends of the magnet, one repels, the other attracts. Constant movement, constant flux.”
“And where do you see humans in all of this?” I ask, wondering exactly how the suppression of this information is important to the Fraternitas.
“We’re all part of the system too, of course. When it comes down to it, we’re all just nested waves—a torus inside of a torus inside of a torus. But here’s where I get pushback from government and academic funding. They will not fund me as long as I support the claim that this system works on the human level, too. And this is why Clath was so keen on getting your Three Hares theory to me—if this symbol is an encoded message about spin on the biological level, it could very well boost my research.”
“Do you think there’s a conspiracy to keep some of this information quiet?” I ask.
Professor Davis exhales deeply and tugs at a tuft of ear hair. “Oh, dear. Conspiracy is such a … well … such an American term. No offense, of course. But there is a tendency to not want to support ideas that show humans are governed by larger forces than just our world leaders.”
I would love to spill everything to Professor Davis; he might even be able to help us with some of it. But I just don’t trust Clath yet. I’m not entirely sure she wouldn’t report us to Didier.
“Well, enough about conspiracy!” Clath says, unable to hide her embarrassment at us asking about it. “There’s a stained-glass window of the Three Hares nearby. Emmet, may I use your printer? Research came up with a curriculum for the church while we were flying here. Just need to print it out.”
This makes me wonder how much Clath is sending back to the school. “Have you sent our paper back to Research yet?” I ask her.
Clath shakes her head. “No, I hold all your work until the end of the semester, and then we put it together and send it to Testing for approval.”
Clath prints out two copies of the curriculum and gives us each one. “Might want to read it on the way,” she says.
When I say goodbye to Professor Davis, he takes my hand in his and says, like I’m a respected colleague, “Do keep me abreast of your research, won’t you? If I can help publish anything on your Three Hares discovery, don’t hesitate to ask.”
The Serpent's Coil Page 11
