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The Secret Mathematic - Chapter Nineteen

The Secret Mathematic is an original novel told in an indefinite number of chapters, posted serially by me, your expository host, Cheeseburger Brown. This is the nineteenth installment.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|...

Multimedia: Listen to the The Secret Mathematic Overture in MP3 format, by Syntax Error.

Related reading: Stubborn Town, Three Face Flip, The Long Man, Plight of the Transformer, The Extra Cars

And now, the story continues:


NINETEEN

"Doctor?"

Abrams looks up.

"The prince will see you now."

Bahram's apartments are opulent. The archways framing the walkout to the balcony are shrouded in red velvet drape lining niches of white marble sculpture on ebony pedestals. The warm breeze from outside causes the drapes to sway, seeming to wave invitingly to the old physician.

He aches.

He crosses the floor and steps out into the sun. He puts his hands on the white stone railing and looks out over the city of Nuribad spread beneath him. A cloud of seabirds circles over the beach. A shining white cruise ship is docked at the pier. Cranes hum as they turn. In the markets below, camels snort.

Someone is hammering. A crew labours over a ruined section of the palace walls, clearing the rubble into giant yellow bins and chipping the broken edges smooth. A bulldozer stands by, and so does a cluster of armed guards.

Abrams straightens as he feels a presence behind him. "Dr. Abrams, I presume," comes a smooth voice.

He turns, extending his hand. "Prince Siraj," he says. "A pleasure to finally meet with you."

Bahram looks exhausted. He offers a tired, polite smile beneath his thin moustache as he shakes Abrams' hand. His suit is immaculate cream, his watch heavy and dazzling. The skin around his eyes is swollen and discoloured. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Doctor," he says hoarsely, "but my schedule is quite unmanageable at the moment."

"Forget about it. I look in a rush?"

"We very much appreciate your taking the time to see us."

"It's what I do. Can you tell me about the Shah's condition?"

Bahram nods wearily, crossing his arms. "We had...a serious security situation. An incursion into the palace, to be frank. My father was rather badly injured in the ensuing mayhem. Significant damage was done before we were able to regain control. I've been coordinating the clean up effort for days."

Abrams rubs his bearded chin. "May I ask who was behind the attack?"

Bahram waves dismissively. "Rebel forces," he says shortly. "Radical insurgents. It isn't important."

"It isn't?"

Bahram narrows his dark eyes. "I was under the impression Medecins Sans Frontieres didn't take sides."

"That's true, sure," nods Abrams. "Don't misunderstand me, Prince: I'm only curious -- there are no conditions under which I would refuse to treat your father. This is why you can be candid with me. Political judgements aren't mine to make."

"This is bigger than politics," says Bahram with a sigh. "There are certain facts I am obliged to make you aware of before you can see the Shah."

Abrams folds his hands before him attentively. "Please."

Bahram wanders over to the edge of the balcony and puts his hands on the rail as Abrams had been doing only moments before. He gazes out over the panorama, shoulders slumped. "My father's most trusted physician was killed in the attack. He will be sorely missed."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"He will be sorely missed as a man," continues Bahram, still staring out over the city, "but even more so he will be missed as a brilliant clinician already initiated with the knowledge he needed to cater to our special needs here at the palace. His responses could be anticipated."

"But mine cannot? I assure you, Prince, my responses are governed not only by my oath but also by the creed of my organization." Abrams spreads his hands in appeal. "What can I say to convince you that your business isn't mine?"

Bahram turns. His face is hard. "And I assure you, Dr. Abrams, that you have no way of guessing your reaction to our...business. You operate from a simpler vantage. You imagine you have the luxury of divorcing your duty from moral concerns." He smirks humourlessly, his tired face pinched. "You are wrong."

Abrams shakes his head. "I've worked in Rwanda --"

Bahram holds up a hand. "I am familiar with your record, Doctor. Never the less, you are in for a change in perspective. I guarantee it. Let me ask you this: how old do you think I am?"

Abrams frowns, looking the swarthy royal up and down. "Between thirty-five and forty, I should say."

Bahram sniffs, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again they glint. "I was born in nineteen thirty-six, sir."

Abrams blinks. "I'm sorry? This is what -- some kind of Islamic calendar?"

Bahram shakes his head. "Common era. The Nazis encroach into Rhineland. Pittsburgh is flooded. Roosevelt triumphs over Landon. Edward the Eighth abdicates. Nineteen thirty-six."

"That's simply not possible. You would be over sixty years old..."

"I wear it well."

Abrams steps forward decisively. He reaches up and takes Bahram's face in his hand. The prince does not resist. Abrams turns his face one way and then the other, looking into his eyes. He gently tugs down Bahram's lower lip and examines his teeth and gums, then palpitates his youthfully tight jowls and unlined neck. Next he grabs Bahram's arm and forces back the sleeve in order to take a pulse through the wrist. He hesitates, however, as the sleeve snags on something on Bahram's forearm. Abrams furrows his brow as he works the fabric around the obstruction: it's a plastic intravenous valve, woven directly into the skin. He looks up sharply. "What's this?"

"That's where I take my medicine."

"Narcotics?"

"No. Ambrosia."

Abrams steps back again, regarding the prince critically. How could it be true? How could this lean, smooth-skinned man be as old as he? Abrams looks down at his own liver-spotted hands, feels the throb in his knees from standing so long. Though no one but his wife knows it, Abrams wears padded undergarments because his bladder tends to leak. And that's just the start. After six decades his body is a weathered and failing apparatus...

Bahram coughs, then leans heavily against the stone railing. Abrams reaches out to support him. "You're not well."

"I am fine," insists Bahram, twisting his shoulder to shake off Abrams' hand. "I'm only tired."

"You seem worse than tired, Prince."

Bahram grimaces. "Over the last sixty years I have seen less than twenty, Doctor, because for every sixteen hours awake I am obliged to sleep for fifty. My existence depends upon the uncomfortable commingling of two disparate technologies, and I have pushed the relationship to the limit these past few days. I have not had rest in seventy hours."

"What technologies? Are you telling me the Shah has found a secret for cheating death?"

"No," says Bahram seriously, "he didn't find it -- he is it."

They both turn as a telephone rings. Bahram walks back inside and picks up the receiver. He speaks quietly and then replaces it, looking up at Abrams significantly. "My father calls us to his chambers, Dr. Abrams. Won't you follow me?"

Abrams blinks, swallows, then stoops to pick up his medical bag. "Of course, Prince."

Though the palace is labyrinthine Abrams has the distinct impression as they walk that they are pushing deeper and deeper within its precincts, each archway they pass through taking them further away from the front gates, the punctured walls, the gardens. They come at last to a brass-gilded elevator carriage flanked by two men whose dark swathing leaves only a narrow slits for their eyes -- milky, unfocused, wandering. Though it seems they cannot see him the guards nod to the prince cordially and salute in perfect concert, automatic rifles slung over one shoulder and great, curved scimitars shining behind the opposite hip.

"Has he taken his tea?" asks Bahram quietly of the guard on the right.

The man makes a series of quick gestures with his left hand. Bahram nods and then steps past him into the elevator carriage, drawing the gate closed behind Abrams. "The guard is a mute?" asks the physician.

Bahram shakes his head curtly as he enters a code into the keypad above the controls. "He has no tongue, Doctor," he says, selecting a destination and stepping back again. He looks sideways at Abrams. "Security, you understand."

Abrams feels a sinking sensation in his belly.

The carriage jerks to a stop. The gate clatters aside by Bahram's hand, which then gestures to Abrams to proceed. Abrams walks out into a tunnel scarcely larger than the carriage itself while Bahram loiters at the threshold of the elevator. "Close your eyes," he advises.

Abrams looks back. "Close my eyes?"

"The scan will only take a moment, but it does involve a pulse of fairly intense ultraviolet light. Photokeratitis is a slight but real danger."

Abrams closes his eyes. His rising anxiety causes the lids to flutter, so he squinches them shut with a determined grunt.

His eyelids flare pink, the capillaries casting lightning-like shadows on Abrams' aging retinas. The air crackles with ozone and the small hairs all over his body stand up on end. Machinery clanks metallically. Abrams shudders but holds still.

"That's fine," declares Bahram.

Abrams opens one eye cautiously, and then the other. "Okay? Alright? You're now adequately satisfied that I don't have a bomb up my tukas?"

"We are satisfied, yes," replies Bahram smoothly, "that you are indeed completely human."

Abrams casts him a wry look. "You're pulling an old man's leg now, nu?"

Bahram smirks cryptically, but says nothing. Together they pass through a door on the opposite end of the scanning tunnel and proceed through a high-ceilinged corridor whose walls are lined with portraits in oils: princes of Araby adorned in every fashion from nineteenth-century English pomp to ninth-century skins. At the end of the corridor, in stark contrast to the mahogany wainscoting and crystal chandeliers, hangs a membrane of opaque white plastic bisected by a zipper.

"Renovations?"

Bahram shakes his head. "Germ control."

The zipper zings as it's opened. They step over the membrane and Bahram seals it behind them. Abrams finds himself standing in a luxurious washroom appointed with black marble sinks and shining steel fixtures. A skylight admits a pool of harsh sunshine, a round puddle of glow in the middle of the tiled floor. The puddle is striped, for the skylight is barred.

"Wash," instructs Bahram, nodding at the closest sink. "Be thorough. Imagine you proceed to surgery."

Abrams washes. So does Bahram. They roll up their sleeves and douse their hands in germicidal soap, then rinse repeatedly in hot water. There are no mirrors in the washroom so Abrams in unable to judge the expression on his own face, unable to calibrate the effectiveness of his studied masque of professional inscrutability. Without looking up he says, "Your father...is he a hypochondriac?"

Bahram sniffs as he reaches for a hand towel. "Hypochondria, Doctor, is a matter of perspective."

"From a physician's perspective a hypochondriac worries that trivial symptoms are morbid ones. What other perspective is there?"

"Perhaps I should have said a matter of scale."

Abrams shuts off the faucet and takes his own towel. "You can explain that a little, maybe?"

Bahram crosses his arms and leans against the wall. "How many times have you flown in an airliner, Dr. Abrams?"

"I couldn't count. I fly dozens of times each year for my work. A couple of hundred flights? It's a guess."

"Do you feel safe when you fly?"

"More or less. Shouldn't I?"

"You may or may not know that the incidence of airliner fatalities lies between one in four hundred thousand and one in five million, depending on the type of aircraft sampled. In order to be assured of losing his life in an airliner tragedy, a man might have to fly every living day for a thousand years."

"Sure, sure -- but that's not a concern to me, obviously. If it were, I doubt my insurer would take my business."

Bahram nods seriously. "Quite right, Doctor. Quite right." He beckons as he walks to the far side of the washroom and mists himself with an antibacterial spray from a wall-mounted dispenser. "The rate of airliner failure is acceptable to man who doesn't expect to ride five million flights. But what if you did?"

Abrams joins him at the misting station, brow furrowed. "I suppose I'd opt to walk?"

"Indeed, if you valued your life. Let me ask you this: what is the mortality rate for a typical human rhinovirus?"

"The common cold? Practically nil, provided no complicating factors like compromised immunity or preexisting infection."

"But the chances of rhinovirus fatality are greater than zero, are they not?"

"Sure, sure. It can happen, particularly if the virus settles in the lower respiratory tract. It's not unknown in infants and the elderly."

"How many rhinovirus attacks do you imagine a man might have to defend himself against before contracting a strain whose characteristics or his own circumstances rendered it fatal?"

Abrams shrugs. "Too many to worry about, Prince. A healthy man has a far better chance of exploding in an aircraft or being eaten by a shark than dying from a cold. In an average lifespan an immune system might come in contact with a few thousand varieties of rhinovirus, out of which only a small percentage would actually gain a foothold in the body."

Bahram nods. "An average lifespan..." he muses, then looks up sharply. "So consider, Doctor, how these gauges of risk are altered if one's lifespan is, in fact, very far from the mean." He looks into the physician's eyes. "How many colds would you allow yourself to catch and combat, if it were your hundred thousandth infection instead of your fiftieth? How many flights would you board? How many red-light runners at intersections would you brave with your car? How many times would you leap instead of looking, knowing that your luck is finite and your opportunities for harm endless?"

"The Shah is immortal?"

"No. If he were he would scarcely be concerned with safety. He is not at all immortal, Doctor -- his life is merely long."

Abrams takes a breath. "How long?" he whispers.

"Long enough to change the scale of risk...long enough to be preyed upon by the thinnest shadow of a statistical basis point. Long enough to live in fear."

Abrams crosses his arms. "So why bother to go on?"

"Because critical work remains unfinished," says Bahram heavily. "Come."

Another zippered membrane, another corridor. The terminus of this corridor is flanked by two robed guards. They turn to meet Bahram and Abrams, their milky, sightless eyes wandering. Their nostrils flare. The guards incline their hooded heads toward the pair, sniffing like dogs. Abrams widens his eyes in discomfort but holds still for this unusually intimate inspection.

"Oy," mutters Abrams, "the dogs at Ben Gurion have nothing on these guys. This is what I call a thorough screening."

"They are Saqaliba zduhaci," explains Bahram as he is snuffled. "They can smell discord."

"Discord?" echoes Abrams with a wry smile. "I'm more of a Polo man, myself."

"You joke. My father will like you."

"I'm being perfectly serious. What can these...Saqalibas detect through odour? Anxiety, maybe? Nervous ill-will?"

Bahram shakes his head. "That would be too coarse a metric to be useful. People have all kinds of reasons for feeling afraid. Besides, as you say, it's a job for a dog."

"So explain it to me?"

"Human scent perception is based on an electron exchange with the G-protein coupled receptor, inducing a quantum tunneling effect whose consequence is a characteristic reverberation in the electrical field of the particle being examined. Zduhaci are preternaturally sensitive to unexpected perturbances in the resulting resonance."

"And this tells them...what?"

"That something is amiss."

The guards draw back and resume their posts. Abrams smoothes down his jacket. "I'm not sure that's how they explained the nose to me in medical school."

Bahram raises one brow. "Your education is about to be augmented, Doctor."

The Shah's chambers are a world unto themselves. Colourful birds flit beneath a glass ceiling, chirping as they swoop into and out of a massive, broad-leafed deciduous tree growing from a well in the marble floor. The well is surrounded by a circular moat fed by a gurgling fountain, crossed by two quaint footbridges whose posts are intricately carved into the forms of horses. Outside the moat is a host of sofas with velvet pillows spaced between golden pillars. Everywhere there are statues of green copper, some describing figures classically while others follow a more esoteric school. Many of the tall green figures are depicted wearing stylized armour of a kind Abrams has never seen before. In place of eyes they wear polished opals.

Through the skylights Abrams notes braces of guards on patrol, slowly circumnavigating the roof, their scimitars winking in the sun as their boots cause the gravel to murmur.

Beyond the tree is an orrery, a grand and imposing brass filigree of orbs and arms, marking the position and rotation of all the largest heavenly bodies in the Solar System with muted strains of overlapping ticking. The apparatus reaches nearly to the skylights, its base eight or nine meters in diameter. On the side of the base is a heavy metal key for winding the works. As they pass beneath it Abrams cranes his neck to take it all in, taking particular note of a cluster of tiny markers ranged on wire-thin armatures between Earth and Mars...

In the furthest corner of the chamber is a magnificent bed, a throne of comforters and silk sheets veiled behind a gathered peak of diaphanous fabric suspended from a single point above. A form stirs within.

"Father," calls Bahram. "The new doctor is here."

"Very good," replies a voice from the bed, reedy and bright. "Bring him around to me, Bahram."

Abrams feels his guts lurch in sudden dread. His imagination reels, presenting him with image after image conjuring the various kinds of horror that might lurk behind the veil. If what Bahram tells him is true, he is prepared to accept that anything might await him. A Frankenstein's monster, a repugnant mutant, or someone merely sallow, sick and sad.

Abrams suppresses a gasp.

Sitting in the bed, propped up by pillows, is a little old man with cocoa skin, a pot belly and a small red hat. "Hallo!" he smiles.

"Highness," says Abrams with a bow of the head. And then, after an uncomfortable pause, he adds, "I like your fez."

The Shah's eyes dart upward, as if he might see his own hat. "This, Dr. Abrams, is what is known as a cahouk. It is very special to me, as I the last of the Mamluks. Thank you for your compliment." He looks over at Bahram and snaps, "Go to bed!"

Bahram steps closer. "I will, Father, I promise. I only have to tend to the --"

The Shah raises a hand and Bahram falls silent. "Your health does not belong to you," he says crisply. "Mind your duty and protect it as you should. There is no argument. Go now."

Bahram bows, turns on heel, and strides across the chamber to sweep past the blind Saqaliba guards. Seconds later the zipper zings. Abrams turns to face his host, who is putting aside a tray of tea. Beside his pillow are yesterday's international newspaper editions spread in a fan of chronicles, heralds, times, journals and posts.

The Shah wears a neatly cropped white Van Dyke beard and a nightshirt with a napkin tucked into the collar. He is missing his right arm. The shoulder is bandaged. He favours the area when he moves.

"Highness, you're injured."

"I'm healing. And call me Hasan."

Abrams sniffs. "Morris," he says, and then places his bag on the bed and opens the clasp. "And I'm examining you anyway. Since when does a patient know from healing?"

The Shah smiles. "Feel free, my new friend."

Abrams puts a stethoscope around his neck and looks up inquiringly. The Shah untucks his napkin and spreads the top of his nightshirt to present his chest. Between the little curls of white hair the skin is crisscrossed by scars. Abrams listens to the heart and lungs, then measures the blood pressure. He unvelcroes the cuff and puts the sphygmomanometer aside, then uses his own bare fingers to check the pulse in a few locations. He snaps on a pin-light, screws on an oto-opthalmoscopic head and looks into the Shah's eyes, and then his white-tufted ears. "Say ah."

"Ah," says the Shah.

"You have contusions on your neck," mumbles Abrams around the pin-light jammed into his mouth. He gently probes the area. "Is this tender?"

The Shah winces. "Not very."

"What happened to you?"

"I was thrashed with my own arm after it was torn from its socket."

Abrams pauses, blinks, then slowly removes the pin-light from his mouth and clicks it off. "Who would do such a thing?"

The Shah shrugs. "A friend of mine." He pauses, then shrugs again and smiles haplessly. "I suppose it's fair to say we're not on the best of terms right now, he and I. Such things are unavoidable in the long run -- c'est la vie, et cetera and tra la la."

Abrams raises his brow and offers an apologetic half smile. "Hasan, I'm not sure if I want to be a friend of yours."

It's quiet for a moment. Abrams doesn't dare blink.

The Shah giggles. "I can already tell how much I'm going to like you, Morris," he says.

Abrams unpeels the layers of bandaging from around the Shah's shoulder. He picks up his pin-light again and snaps it on to examine the site of the trauma critically. The clean up work is precise and professional, the wound healing nicely with good colour and odour. The bandages are fresh. Abrams doesn't look up as he says, "You're being well looked after. This is good work. I wouldn't worry."

The Shah nods.

Abrams recovers the wound, then straightens with a quiet grunt, rolling his shoulders to adjust his back. It cracks and he sighs happily. "How long ago did this happen?" he asks, replacing his tools in the medical bag.

The Shah glances over at an ornate, clockwork calendar ticking on a shelf above his pillows, squinting at the panoply of gauges. "Three days, less an hour."

Abrams freezes, hand hovering over the edge of his bag. He looks up slowly, brow crinkled. "I'm sorry, Highness -- I've misheard you?"

"You haven't," says the Shah. "It's been seventy-one hours since the unpleasantness."

Abrams takes a breath, cocking his head sceptically as he frowns. "I'm not sure any man can heal like this in three days, Hasan. There's no inflammation. I can barely see any evidence of fibrillar collagen in the granulation matrix -- it's almost totally obscured by new Type I growth. And you want to tell me your body did this in seventy hours?" Abrams shakes his head. "You're having me on, nu? You want to play games with me for some reason." His eyes narrow and he slaps his own knee with emphasis. "Nobody grows Type I collagen that fast. It's not a matter of relative health, it's a matter of violating the laws of chemistry."

The Shah grins. Abram's befuddlement seems to somehow entertain him. "Why do you say that, Morris?"

Abrams spreads his hands in appeal. "These things happen in a specific sequence! When the body detects damage it responds with a tightly linked series of chemical events, each successive stage building on the last. Alright, I can buy that a very healthy man might show mature granular tissue growth in three days, okay, but that's just a scaffolding -- the cellular factories have to get up to speed, too. And I'll tell you, union or no union, it's going to take a hundred hours to even start rolling out the first molecules of Type I collagen."

The Shah nods. His eyes gleam. "What if the collagen could be prebuilt and stored in crystalline form until needed?"

Abrams shrugs. "It's a great idea but it just isn't how animals work. I'm not sure where one is supposed to direct suggestions like that. Prayer, maybe?"

"That is how my body works," says the Shah. "But rest assured that your understanding of the usual mechanisms is not flawed. I know that Bahram has told you: I am not a usual man. I have been tweaked, as my engineers say."

"Tweaked?" echoes Abrams, baffled.

"Modified," clarifies the Shah.

"What do you mean by that, modified?"

"Improved."

Abrams experiences a twinkling of gooseflesh across his shoulders and down his arms. His shirt feels too tight. He whispers, "How can that be?"

"My fate is in equal communication with both Allah and the Devil."

Abrams licks his lips. "Oh yeah? And who do you listen to?"

The Shah closes his eyes as he takes a breath, then casts his gaze at the glass ceiling. "I look only to the light," he says softly. "Ever the light, my friend."

Abrams shifts, but says nothing.

The Shah blinks and turns to him. "I've been in this bed too long, Morris. Will you help me up? I want to dip my feet in the water."

Abrams obeys, grunting as he takes the man's weight. The Shah slips off the edge of the bed and straightens slowly with a sigh. He is very short. He looks down at his nightshirt and then looks up again with an apologetic shrug. "You'll have to forgive my attire. I tend toward the informal whenever I'm recovering from a major injury."

"This happens to you often?"

"Often is a relative term," argues the Shah. "In the long run, everything happens. But it's trifles, just trifles. I'll be right as rain soon enough."

"Sure. Who needs two arms?"

"Exactly right, my friend, exactly right. One cannot unspill milk. C'est la vie, et cetera and tra la la."

The Shah pads over to the moat cut into the floor and gingerly sits down at its edge. He dangles his feet into the gentle clockwise current, wincing and then giggling at the water's coolness. He wiggles his toes. "Why don't you join me, Morris? It's divine."

Abrams hesitates. "Highness, you don't want anything to do with my shoes coming off. It embarrasses me to have to tell you this, but, I have...an issue with foot odour. I use powder, wear special insoles, the whole nine yards -- but, still."

The Shah waves dismissively. "C'est la vie, et cetera and tra la la. Sit down with me now, Morris."

Abrams makes a face, shrugs, then sits down on the smooth marble and unties his shoes, then peels off his socks. "I'm sorry," he says quickly.

The Shah sniffs and rolls his eyes. "I'm not bothered by the smell of people. It reminds me of simpler times."

Abrams slips his hairy feet into the moat. Tiny balls of lint from his socks wash loose, tumbling through the current and away around the tree looming over the two men. They are quiet together for a few moments. Birds chitter.

Abrams clears his throat. "Can I ask you this, Hasan? What's the vehicle for your...improvements? If I were to believe this for a minute, and I'm not saying I do, the first thing I'd want to know is how different are your cells from mine? I mean, no offense, but are you a human being, even?"

The Shah seems tickled to be asked. "Well," he gushes happily, "it's taken me an enormous amount of time to get to the bottom of it. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that, with Hooke's stalwart assistance, I first gleaned that the nature of my anomaly might be inspected and quantified."

"Hooke? Robert Hooke, Hooke? The Father of Microscopy, Hooke?"

The Shah smiles. "He preferred to be called Bob."

"Of course he did. And why not?"

"Observing them was challenging, naturally, because they dissolve instantly upon being separated from my living tissues --"

Abrams raises a hand to interrupt. "Wait, wait -- what dissolve?"

"The animacules," says the Shah brightly, rolling his ankles under the water. "Microscopic clockworks, folded protein machines that populate my body and extend its operational parameters, living alongside and within my natural cells, assisting in and augmenting their powers."

Abrams swallows. "With all respect, I'm not sure I can believe that."

"You're not expected to," replies the Shah breezily. "We're just talking, you and I."

"But you can prove this?"

"You will prove it to yourself," says the Shah. "You will have leave to take any samples of my biota you wish, and you can test them personally in the palace medical wing. My staff will assist you in the use of any device or diagnostic technique you might require in order to quell every corner of your scepticism. You will, Morris, see it with your own eyes. Until then, however, I beg your indulgence in order to keep our conservation together moving ahead."

Abrams lets out a long breath. "Where does it go from here?"

"You'll want to know how I came to exist this way, and the answers will rouse your curiosity to ask after my plans and motivations. Ultimately I hope to assure you that my cause is worth fighting for, and that you will agree to come into my service."

Abrams laughs, then spreads his hand again. "Okay, alright, I'll bite. Imagine I just asked you those questions. I've got no shoes on -- who am I to pretend at dignity?"

The Shah nods. His smile fades as his gaze melts, unfocused, into the current of water sliding around their immersed feet. "There are some in this world, Morris, who are loath to die. I am just one of them. There are others. Not as many as there used to be, but some still persist." He dips his fingers into the water, watching the eddies curl around them in response. "When I first realized that I was different -- when my nieces and nephews aged and died before my unwilling eyes -- I embarked on a mission of sin. I won't bother denying it to you, Morris. I fornicated and slaughtered, ate and drank and laughed, razed and ruined. I was a living nightmare, and my desires were my master."

"Being young isn't always pretty," notes Abrams.

"I believed I had been wrought by the hand of Allah, but I was bitter because I had been charged with no mission, no focus for my endless wakefulness. I had been made a monster and abandoned among men to guess at my purpose. On that account I railed against goodness, in effect daring Allah to confront me...or simply to punish me. I craved damnation. Even the most backhanded acknowledgement would have filled my aching void."

"So what changed?"

The Shah is quiet for moment, his eyes closed in recollection. "One day I encountered the artifact -- a golem, if you will. Though it was severely damaged, it was able to communicate to me the opportunity my role presented."

Abrams shakes his head. "Let me get this straight -- you spoke with a golem? A real, honest to God, golem?"

"He would not call himself that. Nor would he call himself precisely a robot, which is another term we might be tempted to use for a complex mechanical system in the shape of a man who has the power to speak his own mind."

"So what would he call himself, this not-a-golem, not-a-robot?"

"Jeremiah," says the Shah.

"Jeremiah? Are you going to tell me now there are robots in the Torah? Because my uncle tried that one, right before he went to live at the hospital. You wouldn't believe the trouble we had with him after that, sexually harassing the nurses and stealing food from the cafeteria."

The Shah shrugs philosophically. "Maybe your uncle suspected the truth. All of the pieces are out there, for anyone to find. Sometimes I'm surprised it isn't common knowledge."

"What -- robots in the Torah?"

"No, that twenty thousand years of history pivot on a critical moment in the year two-thousand twelve that will decide the fate of the universe as we know it."

Abrams blinks, then slowly begins to nod. "You know, when you mentioned Allah and the Devil I should've counted on prophecy entering the story sooner or later."

The Shah smirks darkly. "This is no mere prophecy," he says. "This is science."

"Sure," agrees Abrams with a careless shrug. "Everybody's got a method. My wife? Don't get me started. She's meshugeneh for astrology. It's all rising this and setting that, rays of Narnia dominant over the influence of Neverland in the House of Krypton. For the life of me I can never keep it straight."

"You're teasing me," says the Shah. "I'm delighted. We've watched you for so long. I was certain from the start I would like you."

"I am teasing you. About suggesting that you've kept me under watch for years, I've got nothing. It's a little too creepy for teasing. I don't know what to say to that. It's my first time having to take for serious something that should be movie dialogue, maybe. Do you use agents in black cars or is it more of a spiritual surveillance kind of thing?"

"There are some agents in black cars," nods the Shah, "but for the most part it's researchers in black chairs."

"That's sufficiently Orwellian," concedes Abrams, rubbing his bearded chin. "Who could complain? It's star treatment. So, what have your nefarious librarians learned? That my son is a frothing Zionist who won't talk to me and I can't seem to help but vote for reprobates?"

"That, given the state of your cancer, you will shortly be uninsurable as a medical practitioner; that, given your dedication to Medecins Sans Frontieres, you are a man whose efforts might be motivated by a noble cause; and finally, that you are knowledgeable, skilled, and sociologically open-minded."

Abrams is startled. He takes a shaky breath and frowns. "Given the state of my cancer," he echoes, "I couldn't be of much use to you for very long."

"Long enough," says the Shah. "Your responsibility will be to train a younger man."

"And then in sixty years you'll do it over again?"

"No. The man you will be teaching has been augmented."

"He's like you?"

"No, he's like Bahram. Only one in a million are genetically compatible to inherit a dwarfed form of my legacy, and from those only a select few are immunologically compatible to play host to my animacules." The Shah sighs, kicking his feet gently in and out of the water. "They last a few centuries. Not as long as I'd like, but long enough to help...long enough to gain the necessary perspective." He wipes at his eye. "I can't tell you how desperately I wish they lasted longer. But c'est la vie, et cetera and tra la la."

Abrams falls silent. A brace of colourful birds swoop over the moat and then flap back up to the glass ceiling. The sky is very blue. The birds' existence is a generous but limited simulation of freedom.

"The artifact told me," continues the Shah, "that I was designed by the Devil."

"By Satan?"

"By a witch, to be precise. I would call anyone with the power to act against Allah a devil."

"How can you tell if someone's acting against Allah?"

"If there is one province of existence that is incontestably the domain of Allah and Allah alone," says the Shah, "it is time and events -- the succession of phenomena from one state to the next. It is this primordial impetus, this direction of flow, that gives rise to all causality."

"Aristotle's Prime Mover," contributes Abrams.

The Shah chuckles. "Aristotle was an asshole. When I find him in the afterlife I have some lessons to administer, and I'll tell you frankly he won't be happy about it." He shakes his head. "My point, Morris, is that any force of will that fetters the passage of history is acting against Allah -- against natural consequence, and ordained causality."

"How does one detect that? How can you tell these so-called natural consequences from unnatural ones?"

"Time," explains the Shah, "is a fluid. It is inherently amorphous, shaped by the topography through which it passes, gushing inexorably toward an attractor whose shape dictates its flow. That attractor is comprised of the laws of physics, created by Allah with all history as its goal." He points down at the current swirling around their immersed feet. "Look at the water, Morris. Were you a blind thing who lived in this stream, could you avoid colliding with my ankle?"

Abrams frowns. "A blind thing?" He squints at the undulating surface. "I'm not sure."

"Notice then," lectures the Shah, "how the flow of the current is perturbed in the vicinity of my legs. If you were a creature attuned to the stream, would you not sense the disturbance?"

Abrams nods. "I see what you're getting at. Even before you get to our legs the shape of the surface changes -- there's a bowshock in front and a wake behind. Am I good student or what?"

"You are a good student," confirms the Shah. "You lack only one crucial detail: the detection of disturbances in time is not so difficult as feeling the bowshock. It is, instead, a matter of feeling the wake."

"How's that?"

"Because, despite our human perceptions and cognitive idioms, the flow of time is not from past to future."

Abrams snaps his head over to stare at his host. "What?"

"Time," presses the Shah, "is drawn irresistibly by the primal attractor to flow from future to past. In short, my friend, we experience history backwards." He points to the water again. "To detect disturbances we don't need to attune ourselves to the subtle lip of surface tension at the bowshock. No, instead, we catalogue the eddies and splash of the turbulent wake -- the signature of interference that defies time's homeostasis, and scars the orderly passage of events."

Abrams chews his lower lip thoughtfully. "How would such eddies manifest themselves? What would one look for?"

"Distortions of probability," answers the Shah, gaze locked on Abrams. "Violations of likelihood, perverting the outcome of chance."

"And these are apparent to you somehow?"

"They would be apparent to anyone who cares to spend a thousand years flipping coins."

"Oh, sure. Let me just get out my daytimer."

The Shah laughs and claps Abrams on the shoulder with his good arm, then takes a hold of his bicep and squeezes it emphatically as he hisses, "There is no craft in the world that could make me this way. There are no secret laboratories capable of morphological manipulation on this scale. There are no underground facilities where such complex programmes are encoded into the orbits of electrons. There exists no spell that could conjure me."

"So who made you, Hasan? Little green witches from space?"

The Shah laughs again, letting his arm drop. He scoops up a palmful of water and watches it rain through his short, brown fingers. "My genesis is not alien to our space, my friend -- no, only alien to our time. The words of the artifact have proven it to me, but there is more. This war that I am in the midst of -- this terrible struggle to own the power at the heart of time's disturbance -- straddles millennia. Half is fought in prehistory, half in the centuries to come. We, Morris, sit here with our feet in the water, just a little over a decade from the fulcrum upon which it will all be decided."

"And what is this fulcrum?"

"It is a science as yet uninvented, a system of numeracy the effects of whose calculations reverberate through reality itself." The Shah pauses significantly. "It is known as the Veiled Computations, and it is the native tongue of Allah. Its algorithms give shape to all there has ever been, or ever will be."

"'In the beginning, there was the Word...'"

He nods with a grunt. "Its discovery was inevitable, given a sufficient span," continues the Shah, eyes roaming the leaves above him. "In this past little while, these past few centuries, as the world has awakened and ignited I would know, even without my proofs, that the time is nigh. Hooke's Royal Society galvanized an international movement of collaborative research, accelerating the pace of knowledge acquisition and cataloguing to a flurry. In a blink we pass from steam to electromagnetism -- another decade goes by and men are looking to split the atom. And now what? Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic modification, quantum computing...in such an environment of aggressive discovery, how long could the Word stay hidden?"

"And you believe this...science of the Word -- these Veiled Computations -- underlie your miraculous animacules?"

"I know it," says the Shah.

"And now, what? You want to make sure it all plays out the way you've been told it should -- you want to preserve and defend the moment that makes your life possible?"

"No," says the Shah firmly. "No, not at all. You don't understand. I am a pawn, my friend, a pawn in a black game. But the artifact has changed the rules, by making me aware that I am a pawn. I cannot see the board from my humble vantage, but I know the will that propels me acts to pollute the purity of Allah's history. I know that that ambition cannot be allowed to succeed." He turns to Abrams, his face grave. "I have sworn that come Hell or high water, I shall see my queen frustrated."

"So you want to stop the discovery of the Word?" guesses Abrams.

He shakes his head. "Impossible. The apple has already been eaten. There is no going back. Humanity marches unswervingly into full knowledge, for good or for ill. Civilization cannot be put back in its cage, or induced to regress without mutilation. It, too, desires life. It would defend itself against pruning, and would automatically reroute around censure. Information, too, is a fluid. C'est la vie, et cetera and tra la la."

Abrams sags. "So I give up. What's your big plan, Hasan?"

"Shortly after the human genesis of the Veiled Computations, the science is fractured, its elements disguised. For want of a better term a safe subset of its tools will be distilled and released to open research; the better part will be camouflaged, encoded and hidden, kept by uncorruptable guardians for a day when humanity's collective wisdom is ready to wield it, or when wielding it is our only option against certain doom...whichever comes first." The Shah leans back on his good elbow, kicking lazily in the pool. "Is that the best solution, a perfect solution? I can't pretend to know. But I'll tell you this, Morris: the alternative is worse. The alternative is unthinkable. The alternative is the victory of my Lady, in which she uses the power of the Veiled Computations to elevate herself as a false god, and detonates the Sun to harness its energy to recarve the laws of physics according to her own perverse design."

Abrams cocks his head. "She wants to be God."

"Yes. And I, and my kind, have been wrought to realize that end." He sighs. "We are sick things. We are wrong. We should never have been. But I have been awakened, and I am compelled to act. The Word must be cleaved and compartmentalized. And I will see it done. There is no proper term for what I am, but I promise you what I will become: an instrument of Allah, and a reasonable facsimile of a good man."

Abrams raises his brow. "No proper term? Are you kidding me?" he asks.

The Shah looks genuinely puzzled. "What do you mean, Morris?"

Abrams shakes his head. "You're telling me you're some kind of technologically-enhanced superman with blood filled with nanites from the future, on a mission to save the universe, and you think there's no name for that?"

The Shah blinks.

"Have you never in your life read a comic book, Hasan?" he asks, his expression an inscrutable mix of amusement and gravity. "My friend, you are a cyborg."

This hangs in the air between the two men for a moment. A telephone rings, startling them both. It is a crimson telephone, resting on a pedestal next to the bed. The peal of its rattling bells is very loud. There is a sudden rustling as a horde of birds flee the chamber, making for quieter and more distant wings of the Shah's apartments.

Abrams helps the Shah to his feet and then the little fellow scampers over to the pedestal leaving a trail of wet prints, feet slapping on the marble. Abrams follows him and then sits down on the edge of the bed. The Shah depresses a button on the crimson telephone. It illuminates and a voice sounds from the speaker grille: "Your grace, you have an urgent voice communication from Windsor. Hash check confirmed."

The Shah's eyes widen. "Put it through in here, please." The speaker crackles and then the hiss of international telephony comes on the line. The Shah clears his throat. "This is Anwar."

A crisp, British voice: "Your Highness, please hold the line for Her Royal Majesty."

"Yes, of course."

A click, a change in background noise. "Hasan, are you there?"

"Betsy? What's wrong?"

Abrams does a double-take, staring between the barefoot Shah in his nightshirt and the gleaming red telephone. As he hears the familiar, regal tone issuing from the speaker he feels suddenly rude and uncouth sitting on a bed with rolled up trousers and dripping toes. He stands. He feels it is the least he can do in the presence of the voice of a monarch.

Elizabeth hurriedly continues, "New York has come under attack, Hasan. Have you seen the television?"

The Shah frowns. "No, my dear. What's the situation?"

"The artifact has been stolen!"

The Secret Mathematic - Chapter Eighteen

The Secret Mathematic is an original novel told in an indefinite number of chapters, posted serially by me, your paranoid host, Cheeseburger Brown. This is the eighteenth installment.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|...

Multimedia: Listen to the The Secret Mathematic Overture in MP3 format, by Syntax Error.

Related reading: Stubborn Town, Three Face Flip, The Long Man, Plight of the Transformer, The Extra Cars

And now, the story continues:


EIGHTEEN

Paris is changing.

It isn't the new, rectilinear monstrosities of American-style office towers rising up to form a new skyline at La Defense. It isn't the union with Europe, or the switching of the money. It isn't the roiling cites with their packed apartment blocks of restless young blacks, populating the nighttime neighbourhoods with the fear of ultraviolence and the putrid plastic perfume of cars set on fire. It's not anger from the Algerians, and it's not bombs from the Basques.

But the air is different. The light is different.

The mood is new, and it is not good.

Drago shivers in the morning sun. He can't quite put a finger on the source of this spike in his sense of disquiet until he glances up impatiently at the traffic signal, waiting for his turn to cross the busy Rue des Ecoles. The signal is red, and at the base of the lamp two people stand staring back across the road, their placid faces lost for brief seconds as they are occluded by delivery trucks and buses.

Drago looks away, but even in the very edge of his peripheral vision he can tell they're still gazing at him: a young man and a young woman, both dressed in crisp white button-down shirts and pleated blue trousers, their hair short and neat and their expressions empty but friendly, like airline hostesses or car show models. Drago leans on his crutch, biting his lip.

The signal turns green. One artery of traffic groans to a halt as the other gears up to go. Still wary after his accident, Drago checks the street for wayward Taxis Parisiennes before venturing off the old stone curb.

Drago hugs his satchel against his side and skirts to the far side of the sidewalk as he reaches the opposite curb, keeping his own gaze shy of the staring pair. They make no move toward him as he passes, but he could swear catching from the corner of his eye a familiar, encouraging nod from the young man. He looks decisively away.

Words from his father's paranoia echo through his mind: "...The apparent strangers who are never more than a few paces behind you in the market, never more than a few doors away in any apartment you let."

Drago hurries along the street.

At the library Madame Lefevre looks up from her desk and smiles. "Young Monsieur Zoran, haven't you already won your degree?"

Drago shuffles up awkwardly and leans his crutch. "There is always more reading to be doing," he explains, fishing his student identification from his wallet. He drops it on the desk and Madame Lefevre points her scanning wand at it: beep!

"Where can I steer you today?" the old lady asks. "Combinatorics, topology, number theory, fluid dynamics? Pure or applied?"

Drago offers a self-effacing shrug. "Mythology?"

Madam Lefevre gapes theatrically. "Mythology?" she repeats. "What's going on? Do you have a girlfriend in the humanities?"

He shakes his head. "I'm just having curiosity about a few things."

She helps him to the appropriate section and after she's disappeared behind a shelf of books he slips a thick album out of his satchel and consults a handwritten index on the last plastic-enclosed leaf. He takes a seat at a catalogue terminal and begins pecking in queries...

He reads. He reads and read and reads. The stack at his study carrel is high and teetering, a motley mix of history, anthropology and fables. It becomes apparent that every people on the planet has a set of similarly phantasmagoric creation stories -- some strange, but most having many principal elements in common -- at the head of a wider body of lore containing familiar clashes of great powers that might at once be histories blown all out of human proportion or fantasies born around a campfire circle. Most likely, it seems to Drago, most legends are a mixture of the two.

The next thing that becomes apparent to Drago is that in such a vast sea of vague, romantic and metaphorical narratives it is easy -- seductively so -- to read in whatever meaning one wishes.

Skirmishes from the ancient past become epic wars, soldiers replaced by gods, military objectives swapped out in favour of magical treasures. The Persian incursion into India becomes a battle for the survival of mankind against daemon goliaths; the Mexica Aztecs' search for a new home becomes an exercise in realizing divinely-inspired destiny as a feathered snake reveals a bog that would become Tenochtitlan and then Mexico City; a rapidly communicable disease becomes a vector of Yahweh's displeasure; a distant supernova is transformed into celestial signage, heralding the coming of yet another in a long line of final saviours...

"The humanities are a mess," he concludes to himself sadly, dropping his chin into a weary palm. "Any of this could mean anything."

He is struck, however, by a curious illustration accompanying a treatise on the Greek Hephaistos, whom Homer described as the inventor and master of ancient golden robots. The illustration is a seventeenth century reproduction of a Dutch painting depicting a conceptual cousin to Hephaistos' inventions, the great brass automaton Talos whom Jason fought at Crete. The depiction reminds Drago of something else he's seen, and he dives into Ratko's album to find the answer.

And there it is: the wounded knight, crumpled beneath a war-ringed eclipse. He holds a boulder in his hands and bleeds ichor from one ankle, just as Talos is reputed to have died.

In another volume he finds a section of a frieze from Jerusalem, a water-worn carving of an armoured giant afflicted at the foot. Across the forehead are Hebrew letters which Ratko's careful handwriting identifies beneath as the word emet: truth.

"Ah-ha," says Madame Lefevre from over his shoulder, startling him. "A golem."

Drago furrows his brow. "What's a golem?"

"A Jewish legend, Young Monsieur Zoran, that speaks of artificial men made of clay and brought to life by sacred strings of words written on sheepskin inserted into the mouth -- or, in this case, inscribed across the forehead."

Drago looks up. "Are they good or bad, these golems?"

"They can only be made by very holy men, so I suppose they must serve good." She looks over at the array of books opened on the desk, lingering over the giant brass automaton of Crete. "It's funny, isn't it? It's almost as if, even all those centuries ago, they had some hint that things like robots would one day exist."

Drago smiles uneasily. "But that is not possible, of course."

"Of course," agrees Madame Lefevre. "It more probably speaks to the limits of our human imagination, a fantasy at the intersection of procreation and technology." She looks up at the tall windows at the end of the aisle and sighs philosophically. "We were created by God so, like children dressing up in their parent's over-size shoes, we pretend at becoming creators of life, too."

There is also a crest or an inscription upon the breast-plate of the golem's armour. Drago traces it with his finger. "Do you know what this is?" he asks.

Madame Lefevre leans closer, pushing her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose. "I'd say it was a Shrivatsa if I didn't know better."

"What is a Shrivatsa?"

"It is a Buddhist symbol -- an endless knot representing the Tantric weave of time, events and effects. It is a physical symbol of the union between Sunyata, or void, and Pratitya-samutpada -- a concept we call in French 'Dependent Co-arising.'"

"Why do you say it cannot be being this symbol?"

Madame Lefevre sniffs and straightens. "This frieze is Late Mediaeval Semitic -- a culture worlds and worlds away from Far Eastern folklore."

"But they couldn't have been completely ignorant of the east, Madame, could they? They would have had business on the Silk Road."

"Perhaps, but it would be unthinkable for Jews to include alien religiosity in a Jerusalem temple. Now that I think of it, it seems more plausible that the carving depicts the Gordian Knot."

"This is Alexander's knot?"

"Precisely -- a knot so complex Alexander the Great could only answer the challenge to unravel it by cleaving it with his sword. For millennia the Gordian Knot has stood as a symbol of intractability -- of a problem so convoluted that only a swift, decisive stroke can render it loose." She cocks her head. "It might be argued that it is also the ultimate symbol of hubris: Alexander did answer the challenge, but in the process the riddle itself was destroyed -- all information about the knot vanishes when it is broken rather than unwound."

"Was it a real knot? Had someone truly tied it?"

She shrugs, smiling as she tugs her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. "Who can say, Young Monsieur? This is a story from the fourth century before Christ. However, the Phrygian priest class was known to create knot-cyphers -- that is, messages encoded into string by patterned tying -- to preserve their secrets and honour the sacred names of their gods. It is not totally implausible that Alexander really did destroy a cherished riddle such as this, but it is equally likely that as a conqueror who broke the line of succession for the Phrygian throne the cleaving of a holy artifact could be purely figurative."

Drago shakes his head. "That's the problem with these humanities -- everything is a could be or might not be. Everything is liquid. Nothing is certain, nothing is known. I wish history had been written by mathematicians!"

Madame Lefevre chuckles and pats him on the shoulder consolingly. "And I, for my part, wish history had been written by librarians."

Drago walks along Rue des Carmes, lost in thought. The sky is leaden, the air thick. It will rain soon. The sidewalk is crowded for the day is ending and everyone is rushing to get to supper. Drago is jostled rudely, but he barely notices. His eyes are unfocused, staring vacantly at the green crossing light ahead. He wants to be able to decide whether his father is mad, and he's bitterly disappointed that his research has neither confirmed nor denied Ratko's raving claims but instead only raised more baffling questions...

He gasps, catching himself at the curb -- he's nearly walked right out into traffic. The signal has changed while his head was in the clouds, unbinding Rue des Ecoles to flow.

His satchel slips from his shoulder and skids into the lanes, jerked by momentum.

Drago's eyes bug out in horror. The satchel is run over by a Mercedes and then sent spinning by a Renault. "My albums!" he cries.

He searches frantically for a gap in traffic so he can dash out into the road, but as he watches the traffic signal snaps back to red without bothering to turn amber. The cars, caught unawares by the signal's sudden leap of states, honk and squeal and lurch in a scramble to clear the intersection. "What the hell?" bellows a truck driver, the cab still rocking from its abrupt stop. The smell of hot rubber colours the air.

Drago blinks in wonder, then sets his crutch on the road and quickly vaults across the closest lane to retrieve the satchel. The strap is torn and there are treadmarks across the pockets, but it is otherwise intact. He hugs it to his chest.

He then raises his eyes and sees the young man and young woman standing on the opposite corner in their starched white shirts and pleated blue pants. They are both pointing and staring at the traffic signal, faces screwed up tight in expressions of rapt concentration.

Their faces relax. They look to Drago in calm concert. Immediately, the traffic signal turns green again.

Drago is forced to scamper across the remaining lanes to join them on the corner. A split-second later a rush of cars blows at his back as they roar through the intersection. Someone beeps at him. He teeters on the curb, off-balance, until the young man steps forward and offers his hand.

Drago takes it and he's yanked back upright. "Thank you," he breathes.

The young man nods, then steps back again.

Drago licks his lips. "Do you know me?" he asks.

Neither of them reply. They continue to watch him, their expressions blank and peaceful.

"How did you do that?" he persists. "You made the light to change."

The young man smiles serenely. "Note the fields that circulate through simple machines. Temper the fields to touch the works, and nudge them. Repeat to cognition."

The young woman dips her head, closing her eyes. "Repeat to cognition," she echoes.

Their steady stares make Drago feel light-headed and cold. A prickling of gooseflesh washes over his narrow shoulders. He starts to sweat. "You...you just leave me alone, okay?" he whispers. "You just to stay away from me."

The strange pair has no reply.

Drago sidles along the sidewalk, refusing to let them out of his sight but quite intent on getting out of theirs. He shuffles around a newspaper box and a pillar plastered with advertisements, then turns tail and begins hobbling away as quickly as he is able. He steals a look over his shoulder: they're watching him go.

He turns the corner and almost crashes bodily into a man in a white shirt and blue trousers. "Sorry," mutters Drago automatically, and then his breath catches as he recognizes the uniform. "No," he says to himself, breathing quickly. "Not another one..."

He shoulders past the man and hurries onward, crutch thumping on the concrete. He worms into a thicker throng moving east along Rue des Ecoles and tries to work his way to its core. He feels watched from all quarters and he longs to disappear, hunkering down so his bobbing head of black hair doesn't poke out from the crowd.

He clings to the clot of pedestrians until a faction breaks off to trudge down the steps into the metro. The corridors of the station are decorated with images in tiles: men and women and children in busy street scenes. Drago walks along the wall, pressed between a line of flesh people and their pixelated cousins in tile. Once on the platform he loiters in a narrow telephone niche and lets a train go by. He takes the second train that comes, darting between the closing doors just as it is about to leave. The warning horn sounds.

The platform draws away, accelerating. People arriving from the corridors become blurs. The last among them before the darkness of the tunnel is a small group of people with matching white shirts and blue trousers.

The train wobbles with the change in pressure. Drago grabs a faintly greasy metal pole for support as he struggles to regain control of his breath. His exposed skin is chilled as the perspiration dries.

He glances warily up and down the compartment, searching for people looking at him. Some are. Regular people, in nondescript clothes. Most look away again in a matter of seconds but some looks linger, curious about his panic. His eyes meet those of a man looking at him over the top of the financial section of Le Monde. Propelled by adrenalin Drago hears himself bark, "What are you staring at? Are you part of it? Are you following me?"

The man drops his gaze to the newspaper nervously. The others look away, too. Drago can see their contempt and discomfort now that his outburst has confirmed to them that he is crazy, or intoxicated.

He faces the window, looking through his own pallid reflection as the train sways and chuckles.

He must disappear! He cannot tolerate the thought of being tracked. It makes him want to vomit. But does one become invisible?

He emerges from the metro system at Trocadero, exiting into the grey light with a hundred fellow travellers. The massive square is checkered with the blankets of trinket vendors and choked with aisles of meandering shoppers -- it's some kind of special event craft market. The Parisians veer clear of the hordes of tourists but Drago steers his crutch right into the colourful, babbling maw in the long, fuzzy shadow of the Eiffel Tower across the river.

Drago charges into a crude vinyl stall covered in hanging T-shirts with garish illustrations of Paris landmarks on them. He grabs a white one featuring Notre Dame and asks, "How much?"

In the next aisle he buys black, wraparound sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. After carefully scanning the crowd for anyone watching him he darts over two more aisles and purchases a cheap grey trenchcoat. Finally, he buys a handbag with a Worholesque version of the Mona Lisa printed on it and shoves his broken satchel inside.

He lets his crutch drop, electing to struggle to minimize his limp instead. His leg quickly begins to ache.

He leaves Trocadero by taxi. He gets out after a few blocks and takes another, tugging the brim of his new hat down low over the sunglasses. He jumps out of the taxi and directly onto a bus, leering dangerously at anyone who dares let their gaze wander toward him.

He gets off in Saint Medard. He spends a quarter of an hour stopped in front of the ruin of Ratko's building, its burned out husk closed in by temporary wooden walls installed by the city for safety. The walls are already plastered in paper bills promoting local bands. The stench in the air is awful. The sidewalk is stained black.

His heart begins hammering in his chest. He flees.

Another series of taxis, buses and short metro rides delivers him to Rue de Trevise. It's taken him two and half hours to get home. The sky is dark and it's spitting light, cool rain. He shuffles down the sidewalk, looking over his shoulder as he digs the key to the apartment house out of his bag. He slips inside and then spends a moment leaning against the door, eyes closed. He releases a breath he hadn't been aware of holding. His lungs hurt.

Climbing the stairs without his crutch is difficult. He's exhausted once he reaches the top. He pushes into the flat, throwing the door open and then slamming it behind him. He dogs the lock, then presses his eye to the spyhole.

His roommate, Guillaume, looks up from his desk with a grimace which melts into a wry smirk. "What in heavens are you supposed to be -- a secret agent?"

"I'm in disguise!" croaks Drago, still winded.

"Obviously," replies Guillaume, rolling his eyes. "...Which, being obvious, rather defeats the purpose one would think."

"I have to get out of Paris!"

Guillaume considers this, brow raised. "I'm sure I've never been so pleased by anything you've said. You've just made my night, Mad Serb. Tell me honestly: are you teasing? Because it's cruel if you are."

The flat is divided in two. A line of masking tape runs along the floor and up the wall, separting Guillaume's immaculate order from Drago's chaos. Guillaume's expression darkens as Drago crosses into his space, knocking over the garbage pail as he rushes to the window. He opens a crack in the blinds and peers down into the street.

"Hey, get out of my half!" cries Guillaume. "What the devil is wrong with you, man?"

Drago presses the blinds together and turns, face flushed. "I'm being followed, Gome."

"Of course you are," replies Guillaume darkly. "I'm sure it's a natural biproduct of dressing up as a secret agent. And for the last time, my name is not 'Gome.'"

"I can't to be seeing anything out there. It's too dark."

"You're wearing sunglasses, idiot."

Drago tears away his hat and sunglasses, then steps over Guillaume's bed to drop into the midst of his home mess, papers crumpling and dirty laundry wrapping around his shoes. He hops free, kicking out his good leg and thereby launching a sock onto Guillaume's desk. Guillaume carefully removes it with a tissue.

His expression is uncharacteristically concerned. "You're acting strange, Serb. Even for you." He looks down at Drago's Notre Dame T-shirt. A price tag is still attached to the collar. "You've been sightseeing? Where the devil are our groceries?"

Drago looks confused, then sheepish. "I forgot."

"You forgot? What are we supposed to eat for supper? Damn it, you fool -- hurry now and you'll make it to Monsieur Tang's before it closes."

Drago's expression is stricken. "I have no more the money, Gome. I'm sorry."

"What do you mean? Where's the money?"

"I bought this hat and coat. And this bag. And this shirt. I'm sorry, Gome. I had no choice."

"You had no choice?"

"Peoples were following me. I had to get away."

Guillaume leans back heavily in his chair, castors creaking. He drags a hand down his face. "So that's it," he concludes quietly. "You've finally gone completely mental."

Drago sags onto his bed. He picks up a chess piece -- a hand-carved bishop with an enormous wang -- and rubs its contours with his thumb for comfort. "I must to speak with the Shah," he mutters. "Maybe he can send me away somewhere far, out of their sights."

Guillaume cocks his head and points to a pile of mail on Drago's cluttered and woefully abused dresser. "The Shah's sent you a letter, actually. I've been rather hoping it's an announcement that your funding's been suspended. You do know I filed a formal complaint against you, of course, after you carved up my bedposts with your ridiculous notations."

Drago leaps off the bed and staggers as he hits the floor, careening into the dresser as his bad leg refuses to hold him. The dresser tips over. The drawers fall out and splinter, spilling underwear and shirts. The mail diffuses into a slurry of papers. Drago paws through them rabidly, his eyes glinting as he picks up a manila envelope decorated with the Seal of Anwar.

Guillaume watches him as he tears it open. In his haste he tears the letter in two, so he's obliged hold the two halves together while he reads.

"Well?" prompts Guillaume. "Please do tell me you're going away forever."

Drago looks up, his features slack. "Yes, Gome," he says mechanically. "I'm going away forever."

Guillaume's eyes widen. "You're not pulling my leg?"

Drago looks over at Guillaume's legs beneath the desk and furrows his brow. He shakes his head. "My research proposal...it has been accepted."

Guillaume blinks. "What? Who would be stupid enough to take up a research project with you, Mad Serb?"

Drago sits on his haunches, the two halves of the torn letter still clutched in his hands. His hands tremble. "It's from McGill University," he explains expressionlessly, looking down to read the letter over again.

Guillaume frowns. "To work with whom?"

Drago looks up. His eyes are watering. With reverence he replies, "With Dr. Felix himself, Gome."

"The Dr. Felix?" gasps Guillaume, turning pale. "Dr. Felix who found an analytic solution for Schwarzchild's contact line conjecture? Dr. Felix of the Felix-Heitzinger mappings? That Dr. Felix?"

Drago nods.

Guillaume's mouth hangs open. "Holy shit," he concludes.

Drago grabs the ragged end of the manila envelope and turns it over. An airline ticket drops out. He picks it up, examines it beneath the fold, and then grins widely. He cheers, "I'm going to the New World!"

The Secret Mathematic - Chapter Seventeen

The Secret Mathematic is an original novel told in an indefinite number of chapters, posted serially by me, your nocturnally active host, Cheeseburger Brown. This is the seventeenth installment.

Chapters: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|...

Multimedia: Listen to the The Secret Mathematic Overture in MP3 format, by Syntax Error.

Related reading: Stubborn Town, Three Face Flip, The Long Man, Plight of the Transformer, The Extra Cars

And now, the story continues:


SEVENTEEN

Sunset on Somerset West. Dundonald Park. Men stand in the bushes.

Mr. Mississauga walks the path, smoking, overcoat trailing out behind. His shadow is long. The light is bronze, the sky bloody. Parliament's spike is in silhouette. The capital is small; he spies senators and spots spies, but names aren't acknowledged in the park. Mr. Mississauga cruises on, gaze averted.

"How old are you?"

"Are you a cop?"

"No."

The kid asks to be called Jack. Mr. Mississauga doesn't offer a name. They take a taxi to his building, then stare at the elevator numbers illuminating in patient sequence. Their bellies quiver and the doors part.

No. 906: Mr. Mississauga unlocks the door, his leather glove creaking as his fingers buzz. The door swings open. Jack wanders forward into the gloom. He's patting his pockets. "It's cool if I have a smoke?"

"Yes."

The light snaps on. Jack slows. Mr. Mississauga is closing the door. Like everything in the small apartment, the door is swathed in a layer of white quilting. So too the walls, the ceiling, the cupboards, the refrigerator -- coated in woolen blankets of blanched curlicues and lozenges, dimpled swirls and nubby-edged squares.

Mr. Mississauga holds out an ignited lighter. Jack blinks, draws out a cigarette, then pokes his face at the flame. "Did you...did you like sew all this yourself?"

"No. I buy the quilts used from a place in the ByWard. I just bleach them out and hang them."

"What for?"

"To keep the noise in."

Jack licks his lips. "You play a lot of loud music?"

"No," says Mr. Mississauga. "I don't sleep soundly."

"Oh, so it's so's you won't be disturbed or nothing?"

Mr. Mississauga shakes his head. "No," he says, then nods toward the refrigerator. "Can I get you something?"

"Like a drink?"

"I don't keep any alcohol. Water?"

"I'm fine," says Jack, smoking. He shifts his weight. "You want to go lie down?"

Mr. Mississauga nods. "This way."

Later, the sky turns a murky shade of brown and the lights of the downtown core stand in place of stars outside the windows of No. 906. A helicopter lingers over Parliament Hill. Ambulance sirens babble and whine, echoing away.

The window is open. Mr. Mississauga leans by it, preparing tobacco.

Jack lounges in bed, tugging the covers over his smooth shoulder against the chill. He smokes languidly. He watches the tall native at the window, half revealed by the city's orange glow: at his shoulders and below his pelvis the soft shine of skin is lost to matte straps and gleaming buckles of his four artificial limbs. His bum is brown, taut and muscular.

"Todd told me about you," says Jack, gaze roaming. "He works Ogilvie. Been with you a few times."

Mr. Mississauga half-turns, lighter flaring. He puffs his hand-rolled cigarette alive, thin lips flexing. He looks back outside the window, trailing fume. "He won't see me again. I've lost my job. I don't walk down Ogilvie any more."

"Shitty. Which do you do?"

"Detective."

"I thought you said you weren't a cop."

"I'm not. I was with intelligence."

"You're like a spy?"

"No, a case investigator."

"So what do you investigate?"

He faces outside as he speaks, half his words escaping on the breeze. "Have you ever heard about military and airline pilots spotting UFOs? I'm the man who writes down their stories, and takes pictures of their burns." Mr. Mississauga drags and exhales. "Did you read about that woman from Nova Scotia who could whistle whatever song you were thinking about in your head? I interviewed her, and oversaw her testing."

Jack smirks. "Are you serious? It's actually somebody's tax-funded job to follow up on crackpot stuff?"

Mr. Mississauga nods humourlessly. "Yes," he says. "Or, rather, it was."

Jack props himself up on one elbow. "You got fired?"

Mr. Mississauga looks over at him and shakes his head. "Laid off. CSIS has a new mandate from Parliament to balance the budget. Our field of inquiry was deemed...non-essential. So they shut down the whole department."

"Did you get a gold watch?"

"Ten weeks pay and a handshake."

Jack stabs out his cigarette and shivers. "What're you going to do? Find a new job?"

Mr. Mississauga turns back toward the window and pulls it closed. "No." He pauses, eyes unfocused. Jack watches his reflection in the glass. "I'm still working on a case," says Mr. Mississauga flatly. "And if CSIS isn't going to pay my way to pursue it, I'll go it alone."

"How you going to pay the rent? You going to start hanging around in the park with me?"

"I can't pay the rent. It doesn't matter, because I can't stay here. The case is moving, and I have to follow it."

"The case moves?"

Mr. Mississauga nods, looking over his shoulder at the youth. "It isn't really a single case, but rather a matrix of connected cases. The more I investigate the more I'm able to build up a coherent picture of the pattern of occurrence, and hopefully learn what's at the heart of it all." He takes a breath. "And put a stop to it."

Jack looks at him quietly for a moment, then blinks. "Are you pranking me, or are you for real?"

Mr. Mississauga offers him a small, tight smile. "Real," he says.

Jack licks his lips quickly and draws his knees to his chest, hugging his own shoulders as he rocks lazily on the sheets. "So what happens? What are the cases about? Is it aliens? You can tell me."

Mr. Mississauga smokes, considering this as he leans against the window frame. "I don't know," he decides. "Someone reports something unusual. We look into it. Most of the time it's nothing -- contagious hysteria stemming from a misunderstood natural phenomenon. But sometimes it turns out to be...something more difficult to explain."

"Something impossible?"

Mr. Mississauga shakes his head curtly. "No. Something improbable."

"What's the difference?"

"The impossible never happens; the improbable seldom does."

Jack shrugs. "That doesn't sound so bad."

Mr. Mississauga tightens his mouth into a grim line. "Improbable developments can be trivial in a simple setting -- a rock that against the odds breaks loose and suddenly rolls down a hill, a stream that cuts an unexpected path one spring." He drags on his smoke, then exhales slowly, speaking through the haze. "But consider how things change when you introduce objects of highly compressed complexity, such as a Mammalian brain...objects that simulate and mirror aspects of the real world within themselves symbolically, which then lead to decisions -- often consequential decisions -- based on rule-based manipulations of those symbols."

"You lost me."

"Think of it this way: it's one thing for an unlikely event to occur in the world, but it's another thing altogether -- on a whole new order of magnitude -- for an unlikely event to occur in the virtual world carried around by a creature whose choices have ramifications in the real world."

"It's like double the trouble?"

"A geometric rise in the potency of the smallest seed of improbability, amplified through the complexity of living things by virtue of their own inherent, sheer unlikelihood."

Jack nods. "Oh, sure. That. Well." He drops his knees sullenly, gathering the covers at his chest. "And you're going to stop that how exactly? With a wrench? With a tank? With a nuke?"

"I don't know," says Mr. Mississauga, his voice hollow and uncharacteristically meek. "But I'll manage."

Jack flops back flat on the bed, staring at the quilted ceiling. "That's heavy," he says. "Why don't you forget about it for a while? Come on: let's screw."

"I never forget."

"Let's screw anyway."

In the morning Jack wakes up alone in the bed. Sun streams in through the windows. A woven dream-catcher hangs from the frame, casting a long, bobbing shadow across the quilted wall. Birds chirp.

Jack wanders to the washroom. Over the tub hangs a trapeze-like contraption of pulleys and braces to accommodate Mr. Mississauga's lack of mobility when his limbs are detached. The toilet's arrangements are simpler: a single piece of knotted rope hangs beside it. Jack bats the rope with his free hand while he pisses.

In the livingroom he finds his host sitting in a faded armchair. "Did you sleep out here all night?" asks Jack, knuckling his eyes.

"No," says Mr. Mississauga. "I didn't sleep."

Jack looks sheepish. "Is that my fault?"

"You nodded off. I didn't want to disturb you. Don't worry about it."

"You can't sleep with anybody else around, eh?"

"I can," he replies, "but no one else can." He gestures at the quilted walls. "You see, I scream."

Jack blinks. "You what? You scream -- like all night?"

"No, in cycles."

"You have crazy nightmares?"

"We all do," says Mr. Mississauga crisply. "Only you don't remember yours."

"Damn."

"Do you want to go out to get some breakfast?"

Jack's stomach quakes and groans. He looks sheepish again, then shakes his head and starts toward the bedroom. "It's fine. I got to get going anyways."

"It's on me."

Jack hesitates. He turns slowly, smiling. "You like waffles?"

For some reason beyond fathoming the waitresses at the waffle emporium are dressed as Mediaeval wenches, complete with tightly laced midriffs cinched to upthrust the young bosoms peeking out from scandalously low-cut peasant blouses. Jack looks up from the menu to be confronted by a morass of mammaries. "Can I get an extra scoop of blueberries on the side?"

"Verily, sire. And it cometh with whipped cream included."

"Right on." He raises his brow at Mr. Mississauga. "What's for you?"

"Nothing," he rumbles.

"Nothing?" echoes Jack.

The waitress smiles nervously. "Prithee allow me to tell you of today's specials, sire?"

"No," replies Mr. Mississauga in a tone that brokers no argument. The waitress escapes his gaze gratefully, tucking her notepad away and making eyes at her colleagues.

"You're not hungry?" asks Jack, sipping coffee.

Mr. Mississauga extracts a red and white can of Campbell's Scotch Broth from a pocket in his overcoat and sets it down on the table. His next manoeuvre reveals a compact camping-style can opener. His motorized hand buzzes as he works it patiently around the can's top. "I only eat food whose preparation is disconnected from me personally," he explains. The lid creaks as he folds it back. "Experience has made me prudent."

"You're just going to eat it cold like that?"

"It's pre-cooked."

"But it's not even warm."

"The tea is warm," says Mr. Mississauga as he brushes aside the paper-packaged teabag in favour of one he plucks from his own coat. Like a mechanical prize claw his gloved hand hovers over the pint-sized metal teapot, and then his fingers spring open and the bag drops inside. "It evens out."

Jack sips his coffee again, hiding his expression. The mug knocks on the table as he puts it down. "So, entertain me. Why don't you tell me more about these weird cases of yours?"

"I once visited an Inuit town that had been moved after mining eroded the stability of the underlying bedrock. The inhabitants went to bed in the new town, and awoke at the site of the old."

Jack whistles. "Okay, that's pretty weird. And it wasn't a trick or nothing? You checked it all out?"

"I checked it all out. No trick."

"Tell me another one."

"I once met a Manitoban with a topiary maze in his back garden. Despite the fact that the walls were deeply rooted cedars, the configuration of the maze tended to change over time."

"What else?"

"Back in the department in a special freezer we keep a glass of water that can't be drunk. If you pour the liquid into your mouth nothing reaches your belly and the level of water never changes. The Mounties brought it to us. They found it in the Northwest Territories in a smuggler's den."

"That's creepy."

"And then, of course, there are these," continues Mr. Mississauga, reaching into his pocket again. He withdraws a chess piece and places it gingerly between them on the table.

Jack squints, then blinks. It's a white rook. It sports a pair of breasts beneath the battlements and a set of plump labia at the base. Jack picks it up. "I always thought of rooks as guys," he observes. "But she's hot -- you know, for a game piece."

"I have recovered eroticized pieces such as this from over a dozen different locations."

Jack puts the piece down again. "What's it mean?"

"I don't know yet," says Mr. Mississauga. He inserts a spoon into his cold can of soup and shovels in a mouthful. He looks up as the waitress approaches with Jack's steaming plate of Belgian waffles. She frowns at the soup.

"We don't normally, uh, alloweth outside food," the waitress ventures.

Mr. Mississauga says nothing, looking back at her placidly.

"Thanks," says Jack as he reaches up and takes the plate from her fingers. The waitress accepts this cue and retreats. Jack digs in with relish, speaking around his food: "You're going to find out what's causing all the weirdness? Like maybe it's some chemical or something? Or a secret government experiment?"

Mr. Mississauga sips hot tea. "It isn't a secret government experiment. I've looked through the whole file, and nothing matches."

Jack sputters. "You mean there really are secret government experiments going on?"

"Well," admits Mr. Mississauga, consuming another spoonful of cold soup, "not currently. Like I said, Parliament's mandated balanced budgets all around which means anything in the books that's a challenge to explain has been put on indefinite hiatus."

Jack cuts into his second waffle. "Sure. Of course. Why not? Even shadow conspiracies need to worry about cashflow, right? Everybody's got bills to pay."

"There's no conspiracy. The government keeps programmes secret that have possible implications for national or international security. There's nothing nefarious or fantastic about it: stealth technologies, anti-missile systems, counter-hacking ops. It's about the defense of the country, simple as that."

"I forgot -- you're a company man. You toe the line."

Mr. Mississauga smiles tightly but humourlessly. "I toe no line. I'm not selling you on a vision of your government: I'm just telling you what I know from first hand experience." He pauses. "Also, you have blueberry juice on your face."

Jack mops up with a paper napkin. "What're you going to do next?"

"First of all I need a vehicle," says Mr. Mississauga. "Something suitable for surveillance. And for living in. A nondescript civilian vehicle with room in the back for cameras, equipment, a bedroll and a palette of soup."

Jack puts aside his fork thoughtfully. "Maybe I can help you out. I know a guy. You can do a cash deal, right?"

Mr. Mississauga nods.

"He's probably around this morning. It's not far."

Mr. Mississauga pauses again, spoon hanging over the can. The purple skin under his bottomless brown eyes quivers slightly. "I would very much appreciate that, Jack."

Jack grins. "Just let me finish my waffles, okay?"

The body shop is entered from an alley off Clyde. The heavy metal door meeps electronically as Jack pushes it open, then holds it for Mr. Mississauga. The garage is cluttered and busy, the flash and spark of arc welding flaring up from the furthest corner. Nearest to the door a crew of three work efficiently to strip the body panels away from a dark green minivan. Someone, unseen, is hammering metal on metal. A radio blares a distortion guitar solo tinnily.

"This is Shondel," calls Jack over the din, introducing a tall, high-foreheaded black man in a grubby coverall. "Shond, this is...this is my friend," he concludes lamely.

Mr. Mississauga extends a gloved hand. Shondel shakes it, pursing his lips in consideration of the slow, mechanically even grip. "You have a false arm," he says in a friendly way, his Caribbean accent lilting and low.

"Yes," says Mr. Mississauga.

"Are you a cop?"

"No."

Shondel smiles. His teeth are capped in gold. "Jack tells me you need someting to ride, am I right? And for campin' in? Tat's no problem at all. I got a black van wit integrated hot plate and a foldin' bunk, man. Does tat interest you?"

"A black van is too ominous. I need to blend in."

"You want a camouflage paint job? No problem."

"Urban camouflage. Maybe like a utility or service vehicle. Something normal."

"Someting normal for the serious man," laughs Shondel, clapping Mr. Mississauga on the back as if they are old pals. "Okay, no problem. I tink I'm on your wavelent now, my friend. And I've got the perfect ting."

Jack and Mr. Mississauga wait while Shondel leaves to look into it. The radio continues to blare. Jack winces. "What is this?"

"Cherry Nuk-Nuk," replies Mr. Mississauga, cocking his head. "The world's most famous Inuit pop star."

"Oh yeah?" says Jack. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a top ten music fan."

"I met her. She was born in the town I told you about, where the people were transported in their sleep."

Jack raises his eyebrows. Shondel returns, his domed head bobbing happily and keys clutched in his hand. "Gentle-men," he calls, beaming, "why don't you come wait out front while I fetch the ride and bring it aroun'? Tis way now. You're goin' to love it, man."

He escorts them to another metal door and then holds it open. Mr. Mississauga stumps past him, followed by Jack as he pats down his pockets until he finds his smokes. They emerge into a small parking lot fenced from the street by barbed-wire and sheet metal panels. Various sadly decrepit cars are parked by twin garage doors, heavily graffitoed.

Mr. Mississauga turns to Jack as soon as the metal door has slammed behind them. "Shondel can be trusted? He's not going to screw me?"

Jack shrugs coquettishly as he lights his cigarette. "He might. I don't know if you're his type. I've had a few dates with him and he's pretty -- uh, gymnastic, right?"

Mr. Mississauga frowns. "I don't have a very good sense of humour."

Jack looks at the ground. "Yeah, sorry. Listen, Shond's mechanics are good if nothing else. So the thing should run at least, right?" He looks up, brow furrowed. "Are you okay with an engine? You know how to mess around with them?"

"Yes."

"I'm sure it'll be fine, Mr. Detective Man. Shond's cool. This'll all be cool."

Mr. Mississagua sniffs. Minutes pass. Jack keeps waiting for his companion to smoke, but he doesn't. Jack smokes another. Traffic drones and swishes beyond the locked gate, gusts from the wakes of big trucks rattling the chains. Mr. Mississauga, who has taken a package of plastic-sealed saltine crackers from the waffle house soup cart, wanders between derelict cars and feeds the birds.

Jack licks his lips, shrugs to himself, then doesn't drag on the smoke he keeps hovering by his mouth. "I guess you're not going to be around Ottawa much longer then, eh?"

Mr. Mississauga looks over. "No."

Jack takes a breath. "Maybe you could use some help." He smiles uncertainly.

Mr. Mississauga turns away, shaking out his stiff glove to broadcast crumbs. "No," he says. "I don't take on sidekicks."

"I don't have to be your sidekick. I don't know nothing about what you do. I could just help you like get around and stuff..."

Mr. Mississauga turns back sharply. His look is cold. "What does that mean?"

"I just mean because you're handicapped. I could help."

"I am not handicapped." He turns away abruptly and jerks his hand upward, distributing the last of the crumbs to the chittering sparrows.

Jack scratches at his forearm and then smokes. "Yeah," he agrees vaguely, ashing into the air. "I just thought I'd ask. You know."

Mr. Mississauga hobbles over to him with dignity, eyes now sorrowful. "I know," he says, nodding. "And I'm sorry."

Jack shrugs carelessly, then gestures with his cigarette at the clumps of sparrows Mr. Mississauga has attracted. "What's with the birds?"

"They spook easily."

Jack squints. "Huh?"

"Birds are a natural barometer for tension," he explains. "If they scatter when Shondel returns, then so do we."

Jack hunches his shoulders, hands in his pockets, and glances uneasily back toward the body shop. "It'll be fine," he mumbles around his smoke.

They both turn as the left-side garage door rumbles upward. The birds pause from their snack to look over curiously. A repeating beep sounds and an engine growls and chortles as a large vehicle begins to slowly back out into the parking lot.

Jack steps back, and so does Mr. Mississauga.

It moves out of the garage's shadow, sunlight reflecting brightly from the yellow-orange paint. It's a slightly rust-tarnished, mildly dented micro-schoolbus. The suspension squeaks as it comes to a halt, and a moment later red beacons at the corners of the canopy start flashing on and off. A scratched-up stop sign unfolds from the side of the bus and the passenger door chuffs open. Finally, there is a quiet buzz as a wheelchair access ramp extends from the base of the steps and then clangs hollowly when it hits the ground.

Shondel strides down the ramp and gestures at the schoolbus, beaming widely. "What do you tink of tem apples, my friend?"

Mr. Mississauga hobbles a slow circuit around the vehicle, looking it up and down. He stumps up the ramp, feet banging on the metal, and then walks down the aisle between the twin rows of torn, patched and sun-faded vinyl bench seats. He's nodding to himself as he steps back out into the light.

"So?" prompts Shondel. Birds hop around his feet, vying for cracker crumbs.

Mr. Mississauga looks up from the birds and gives him a tight little smile. "How much?"

Shondel grins.

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