Drift pattern, p.20
Drift Pattern, page 20
Macer stops when he reaches them. He turns to look back at Royse, who has quit hanging the paper sheets to witness her castigation. Upon seeing Macer looking his way, Royse spins around and returns to work.
Macer gestures to Ish. “You there, go help him finish.”
Ish bolts from the area his feet have been frozen to. “Yes, sir. Of course, Your Excellency.”
Luci searches herself. “Why feel embarrassed about being scolded by Macer in front of Ish? Who cares what this goody-goody thinks in the least?”
With Ish safely across the room, Macer sighs. “What do I have to do here to get you to embrace this project, to make you want to invest 100% of yourself? Are you going to wait until you actually witness the citizens of the city starving, rioting in the streets with cybos, fighting for their next meal?”
Luci quietly answers, “I’m sorry. You’re right.”
“What did you say?”
“I made a mistake, and . . . I’m sorry,” she says louder and swallows hard.
Some of the tension drains from Macer’s face, but he still looks old this morning. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but he looks older, as if the lines on his face tripled overnight. He has the same overgrown eyebrows, bald head, dark black marble eyes, but enough wrinkles to lend a map of rivers. There’s a weariness to him that she hadn’t noticed before.
After a long, awkward pause, he answers with a slow nod, “You know, I believe you. I think that you truly regret what you’ve done, what you put at risk by disobeying my instruction. I’m glad to hear you say it. I had hoped that you would come to your senses.”
His hand disappears into the inner pocket of his impeccable jacket. “I’ve brought a token of good faith with me today.” The fingers return with a bright orange envelope. “You may recall how Shar mentioned that we are lucky. Normally, intervals don’t fall that closely to each other. When they do, we call them juncture twins.”
Luci takes the envelope from him, remembering Ish’s astonishment at seeing paper. “What is this?”
A genuine smile forms on Macer’s face, displaying a surplus of even more creases in his face. “Open it.”
She does and wills her eyes to leave his gaze to peek inside. She gasps at the realization of what she’s holding, which makes his grin grow larger when she shoots a look back at him. “A ticket from East Timor,” she says in a breathy voice. “It’s the place that Shar said . . . the fish market where the skip point is. It’s an airline ticket back to the states from there.” Part of her feels stupid for saying this aloud, since he obviously knows what he’s given her, but she continues anyway. “And my passport . . . or at least a fake one that you had made for me.”
“It’ll pass inspection in your interval for an authentic document,” Macer says, nodding approvingly. “Like I said, we are lucky that the twin leap skip juncture in East Timor occurs close enough to when you left. Everyone in your time will simply believe that you were at Ventnor City in New Jersey the entire time, the location that you told Royse on the way to the warehouse.”
She’s impressed that he’s remembered the details of where she was headed before the abduction. “I guess you’ve thought of everything,” she says, wondering if it’s a farce somehow.
He softly cups his hands around hers. “This is only waiting for you to finish the project. It’ll be as if nothing happened.”
She resists the urge to remind him that the skips in time have rendered her sterile. She holds a fragment of hope in her hands and just answers, “Yes, thank you.”
A large sheet of paper falls to the ground across the room. Macer releases her hands to turn to face Royse and Ish. “Don’t be stingy with the adhesive. We need those to stay up there for a while.”
“Yes, sir,” Royse replies as he snatches the wand tool from Ish’s grip and retraces the glue lines.
Luci and Macer make their way around the basin area in the middle of the room. “What’s with all of this, anyway?” she asks. “Is it to block Gicul and his crew from spying in on me?”
“No, you don’t have to worry about anything like that,” Macer says.
Royse pauses using the glue wand to face her. “There’s no way they can get a drobine within a quarter mile of this dome.” The pride in his voice is unmistakable. “We’ve got patrols in the sky and on the water, as well as that cybo you saw yesterday is still stationed outside of the entrance into here.”
“So what is this, then?”
“Improvisation,” Macer replies in what Luci has come to regard as his carnival barker personality. “Luci, no offense—I know that you can solve highly complex number problems in your head—but it’s going to take more than that. I daresay that what’s needed to calculate DPM and stop Gicul from destroying every leap-skip point out there is even beyond your capabilities to do in your head. So, since you forfeited any chance of using a Viatorio to sip DPM tutorials and there’s not a way to install a UNIFON language converter into your mind, you and technician . . .” Macer snaps his fingers impatiently for someone to fill in the blank.
Royse gestures with the glue wand for Ish to answer the chancellor.
“Oh, Moyta, sir. Chronal Technician Ish Moyta is my name.”
The older man nods approvingly at his eager subservience. “Technician Moyta will be forced to work out the problems the pre-world way—on paper.”
Ish breaks protocol, asking in a disbelieving voice, “Sir, you want us to mark on it . . . on the paper?” The word paper is delivered with a mystical reverence.
“Son, I know how rare paper is, but due to the doctor’s recent act of noncompliance, I’m left with very few options.” Macer turns to address Luci. “You may recognize the materials from my drawing room basement, what I used to design and sketch out the statue. I can have more for you in a few days or so.”
“Seriously,” Luci begins, “you guys don’t have white boards here in the future that you can mark on and erase?”
Macer points to his Viatorio and shrugs. “All virtual because of resource consumption.” He raises his voice, intending to instruct both Luci and her new companion. “I’m counting on both of you—strike that, the entire world is counting on both of you to utilize everything at your disposal to put an end to what Gicul is doing.” He moves to the covered wall to press a drooping corner back into place. “The way I see it is that this can be done one of two ways. The defensive approach is to figure out how he and his followers are destroying the intervals and somehow block and prevent him from doing so, or you can take an offensive stance and figure out when and where he’s hiding so that we can capture him and lock him in Carcerium. I’d consider either solution a fulfilment of your duty here, Dr. Gaudiano, and allow you to return to your interval to begin constructing your DPM theorem there as you promised.”
She tucks the forged passport and ticket into her pants pocket.
Macer says, “Now, I need to briefly discuss something of with Technician Moyta here, so if you’ll excuse us for a moment.”
Royse steps back from the wall to admire his handiwork with Macer and Ish. When he moves to apply more glue to one of the sheets first stuck to the wall, Luci moves to join him.
She looks back at Macer, who’s engaged in telling something to Ish. The younger of the two nods yes like a bobble-head doll.
“Royse, I need to ask you something about the chancellor.”
“What is it?” he asks with a grimace, apparently finding it distasteful to talk behind the boss’s back.
“Last night, when he and I were alone, something happened. He had this weird attack . . . not a fainting spell and not a seizure exactly, but—”
The big man’s eyes widen, and he puts a finger to his lips. “Who did you tell about this?”
She’s relieved that he knows and believes. “So, you’ve seen it?”
“Who did you tell?” he demands.
Luci scoffs, which temporarily attracts the attention of Macer across the room. When he returns to instructing Ish, she responds in an aggravated whisper, “Seriously? Take a look around, Royse. Who am I gonna tell?”
Royse acknowledges his dumb question. “Yeah, okay.” In a low voice, he says, “The chancellor’s been under a lot of pressure lately with this Gicul thing.”
“It’s something more than that, trust me,” Luci says. “This was really weird. I’ve never seen anything like it. One of my foster mothers, Mrs. Joyner, had an epileptic seizure once, but it wasn’t like this. This was more eerie.”
Royse steals another quick glance over at his boss. “So, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t know, you’re his protector guy and all. I thought you should be informed, and I wanted to ask if that was his first episode or if this was a common occurrence.”
Royse pauses, and his pained, confused expression clearly shows that he’s trying to figure out a way to avoid betraying any confidences. Finally, he gives in. “The seizures, or whatever they are, what you saw was not the first, but it’s not a frequent thing.” His eyes scan the floor. “I’ve heard stories of how he was sickly as a child, living for many years shut in away from everyone but his father, only communicating through Viatorio. It’s public knowledge that his mother died of Fichtner’s disease when he was very young, leaving Waleen Macer to care for him.”
“You never answered me,” Luci says, committed to pressing him for the answer. “Have you ever seen one of his episodes or not?”
He moves his eyes from the ground to hers. “I’ve only seen it a handful of times. He’s always alright after.” He points to the medical bot hovering near the pull basin area. “They always gave him a good health report like two or three hours after one of those incidents, so I don’t know what it means, but what I do know is that he gets very irritated if you talk about it with him. So I just avoid it altogether.”
“Well, again, I just wanted you to know.”
For the first time ever, Royse looks at her without a hint of resentment or aggression. “I appreciate that, I really do.” He extends one of his massive hands to her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad that you’re okay after the Jardon thing.” There’s a pause as he pulls away. “Though it was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do.”
Luci thinks to herself, “Well, so much for our budding friendship.”
She points at the curved glass being covered bit by bit with the paper. “Those glass walls, have you ever heard of them leaking or anything?”
“What do you mean?” Royse asks.
“It seems like a lot of force from the ocean out there pushing against the glass of the dome. Ever hear of one cracking and letting water in? We’d all be trapped in here . . . under it.”
He eyes her in disbelief. “Dr. Gaudiano, this is probably the safest place in all of Relicus City. The glass will hold.” He scoffs, “Why would you even ask that?”
Her answer is feeble. “I dunno.” She crosses her arms. “I had a bad experience with water as a kid. It just kind of makes me nervous, all that water pressure, you know.”
He spaces the words of his response out evenly. “The-glass-will-hold.”
Macer gestures to him, indicating they should leave.
As the chancellor and bodyguard head for the door, Macer says, “It’s time to get to work, you two.”
Ish says, “Yes, sir, of course, Chancellor Macer,” as Luci wanders up to join him.
Royse enters the code in the door panel, and it slides open. He exits into the hallway, presumably to check for attackers. Luci wonders why there would be the need to do that if what he said about the patrols and the cybo is true. She dismisses it as a force of habit, or maybe to show Macer his dedication to protecting him.
Macer stands in the threshold of the doorway and says in a full voice, “Good luck, you two. Everyone is counting on you. I know you’ll do your best.”
Luci softly jabs Ish in the ribs before he can offer his canned, “Of course, sir, yes, sir,” response. He looks at her quizzically.
The door slides shut.
“What were you and the chancellor discussing, Ish?”
He shrugs a little. “He was just relaying expectations.”
“I see,” Luci says. “Expectations of what? Do you have different duties than I do? Are you to report back to him about me like a spy? You know that term, right? Spy?”
He shakes his head and fidgets. “The chancellor didn’t mention anything like that.” He takes in a breath and releases it slowly. “He did the same thing for me that he did for you.”
“What did he do for me?”
Ish looks embarrassed to admit it. “He gave me an incentive like how he gave you an incentive to finish the project.”
“What did he promise to do for you?” She’s surprised. “What’s your incentive? Isn’t saving the world enough?”
The only door into the domicile slides open with the pneumatic hiss, startling them both.
Macer announces from the opening, “Dr. Gaudiano, you’ve probably already figured this out on your own, but just like how I said there are two ways for us to defeat Gicul, he has more than one way that he can win without attacking the Grange at all.”
“You nearly scared us out of our wits just now!” Luci protests.
Macer shrugs with indifference. “It should be obvious to you that if he were to execute you during your stay at Relicus City or murder you back at your own interval before the DPM groundwork is released, everything ends. But Luci, have you considered what happens if he destroys the skip point juncture that you go through to return to your interval, the one you have the air vessel ticket from? He may not know where you are here, but learning the interval coordinates is as easy as reading lines on a map.”
He pauses, and Luci is uncertain if this is for dramatic effect or if he’s awaiting a reply from her.
She chooses not to respond.
Finally, he adds, “So believe me when I say that we’re in a race against time here. Now go get busy.”
This time, the door zips shut before Ish has the chance to offer some kiss-up reply.
~ Three ~
Ish wastes no time in sharing the fundamentals of drift pattern mathematics to his solitary pupil. He only pauses every now and then to sip Jardon from the pull basin to ensure that he hasn’t glossed over any part of the theorem mechanics that he may mistakenly assume she already knows.
Luci devours the information with an insatiable lust that surprises even her. She marvels at the intricacies of the formulas and imagines herself much like the member of a lost Aboriginal tribe hearing a Beethoven symphony performed by a world-class orchestra for the first time, a cascade of music notes pouring over the enraptured listeners’ eardrums.
At no time does she feel that DPM is her creation and that she deserves credit for it; rather, its beautiful complexity and its simple arrangement of mathematical architecture humble her. Just as one discovering a magnificent vista from which to view a sunset cannot lay claim to the millions of pink, orange, amber, blue, and green hues displayed, she is unable to truthfully assert any ownership here. She counts herself as nothing more than the metaphorical mountain climber who turned the bend at the precise moment the sun dipped into the horizon, exploding in color.
At one point, Ish explains that some unknowns remain with DPM. He refers to these exceptions as “porous” number compounds or “limber DPM numbers” in which varying abstractions perform double duty and thereby alter fixed outcomes. Though he admits that these occur extremely infrequently, Luci is intrigued and thrilled that there is more to discover in this field.
So enamored is she that after many hours of lecture, Ish informs her that they’ve skipped lunch and he needs to stop for a dinner break. Luci reluctantly complies, quickly eating the pouch meal from the food printer while staring at the notes she’s transcribed on the paper affixed to the glass walls.
When Ish’s voice begins to give from the strain of instructing almost non-stop for the entire day and late into the evening, Luci accedes to allow him to return to his home.
“You promise to be here early though, right?” she asks like a child forced to wait one more day before opening presents.
He chuckles, and in a thin voice that’s ragged and on the verge of shutting down, he answers, “My Viatorio tells me that it’s 2:38 AM now. I’ve called for an automated transport to collect me in five minutes to take me home. With the added security surrounding this place, it’ll probably take ten to get here, so I’ll be in bed by 3:00.” He yawns and rubs his eyes. “Can we say that I’ll be back over here by 10:00? That’ll give me at least six hours of sleep.”
“No way to make it 8:30 or 9:00?” Luci bargains, still buzzing on everything she’s learned.
“You’re insatiable,” he says, comically collapsing to the couch. He yawns again, removing the rubber WIBs from his fingers to crack his knuckles.
“We can make it 9:30 then,” she says. “You can nap here on the couch until you’re ride comes to the door.”
With closed eyes, he says, “It’s an auto-transport. There’s no driver. I wait on the platform outside. For security reasons, the chancellor won’t allow anyone to come down here.”
Still negotiating, she offers, “I’ll wake you in a few minutes, but we begin at 9:30 tomorrow.”
He waves his hand sluggishly and mumbles, “Fine, 9:30.”
“Great,” Luci says, grabbing his flailing hand to shake on the deal.
After Ish leaves, Luci jumps back into work for another hour or so. She reviews in detail all that she and Ish covered in their first session, and excited butterflies flutter in her stomach just as they did hours before.
Luci steps back to review the many sheets that they’ve filled up throughout the course of the day’s work. She slumps down to the sofa for a more comfortable viewing. Though her heart still thrills with excitement, her eyelids droop as she scans the curved wall of numbers and related formulas. “I’ll just close them for a moment,” she mumbles to herself as she dozes into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
