“This needs to remain cold,” he said. “If the electricity should go out, it will be fine for up to three days. But if I am delayed getting back, and the inside temperature starts rising, you will need to go out and get some dry ice to cool it again. Here is the lock. Do you remember the recursive equation I showed you?”
“You mean Jemma’s equation?”
He hesitated in surprise, then said, “Yes. If you take twenty-seven for the first value of X, then solve it five times, that will give you the combination. That should be child’s play for you.”
“What’s in it?” Thorn asked.
At first he seemed reluctant to answer, but then realized he had just given her the combination, so he knelt and pecked it out on the keypad. A light changed to green. He undid several latches and opened the top, then removed an ice pack and stood back for her to see. Thorn peered in and saw nested in ice a ball of white feathers.
“It’s a bird,” she said in puzzlement.
“You have seen birds, have you?”
“Yes. They don’t have them here. Why are you keeping a dead bird?”
“It’s not dead,” he said. “It’s sleeping. It is from a species they call ice owls, the only birds known to hibernate. They are native to a planet called Ping, where the winters last a century or more. The owls burrow into the ice to wait out the winter. Their bodies actually freeze solid. Then when spring comes, they revive and rise up to mate and produce the next generation.”
The temperature gauge had gone yellow, so he fitted the ice pack back in place and latched the top. The refrigerator hummed, restoring the chest to its previous temperature.
“There was a . . I suppose you would call it a fad, once, for keeping ice owls. When another person came along with a suitable owl, the owners would allow them both to thaw so they could come back to life and mate. It was a long time ago, though. I don’t know whether there are still any freezer owls alive but this one.”
Another thing that might be the last of its kind. This apartment was full of reminders of extinction, as if Magister Pregaldin could not free his mind of the thought.
But this one struck Thorn differently, because the final tragedy had not taken place. There was still a hope of life. “I’ll keep it safe,” she promised gravely.
He smiled at her. It made him look strangely sad. “You are a little like an owl yourself,” he said kindly. “Older than the years you have lived.”
She thought, but did not say, that he was also like an owl—frozen for 141 years.
They left the apartment together, she heading for home and he with a backpack over his shoulder, bound for the waystation.
Thorn did not wait two days to revisit the apartment alone to do some true detective work.
It was the day of the Protector’s funeral, and Glory to God was holding its breath in pious suspension. All businesses were closed, even in the Waste, while the mourning rituals went on. Whatever repercussions would come from the assassination, they would not occur this day. Still, Thorn wore the veil when she went out, because it gave her a feeling of invisibility.
The magister’s apartment was very quiet and motionless when she let herself in. She checked on the plants and emptied the pail in order to give her presence the appearance of legitimacy. She then went into the magister’s bedroom, ostensibly to check the freezer, but really to look around, for she had only been in there the one time. She studied the art-encrusted walls, the shaving mirror supported by mythical beasts, the armoire full of clothes that had once been fine but now were shabby and outmoded. As she was about to leave she spotted a large box—a hexagonal column about three feet tall—on a table in a corner. It was clearly an offworld artifact because it was made of wood. Many sorts of wood, actually: the surface was an inlaid honeycomb design. But there were no drawers, no cabinets, no way inside at all. Thorn immediately realized that it must be a puzzle box—and she wanted to get inside.
She felt all around it for sliding panels, levers, or springs, but could not find any, so she brought over a lamp to study it. The surface was a parquet of hexagons, but the colors were not arranged in a regular pattern. Most tiles were made from a blond-colored wood and a reddish wood, interrupted at irregular intervals by hexagons of chocolate, caramel, and black. It gave her the strong impression of a code or diagram, but she could not imagine what sort.
It occurred to her that perhaps she was making this more complex than necessary, and the top might come off. So she tried to lift it—and indeed it shifted up, but only about an inch, enough to disengage the top row of hexagons from the ones below. In that position she found she could turn the lower rows. Apparently, it was like a cylinder padlock. Each row of hexagons was a tumbler that needed to be turned and aligned correctly for the box to open. She did not have the combination, but knowing the way Magister Pregaldin’s Vind mind worked, she felt sure that there would be some hint, some way to figure it out.
Once more she studied the honeycomb inlay. There were six rows. The top one was most regular—six blond hexagons followed by six red hexagons, repeating around the circumference of the box. The patterns became more colorful in the lower rows, but always included the repeating line of six blond hexagons. For a while she experimented with spinning the rows to see if she could hit on something randomly, but soon gave up. Instead, she fetched her slate from her backpack and photographed the box, shifting it on the table to get the back. When she was done, she found that the top would no longer lock down in its original position. The instant Magister Pregaldin saw it, he would know that she had raised it. It was evidently meant as a tamper detector, and she had set it off. Now she needed to solve the puzzle, or explain to him why she had been prowling his apartment looking for evidence.
She walked home preoccupied. The puzzle was clearly about sixes—six sides, six rows, six hexagons in a row. She needed to think of formulas that involved sixes. When she reached home she went to her room and started transferring the box’s pattern from the photos to a diagram so she could see it better. All that afternote she worked on it, trying to find algorithms that would produce the patterns she saw. Nothing seemed to work. The thought that she would fail, and have to confess to Magister Pregaldin, made her feeling of urgency grow. The anticipation of his disappointment and lost trust kept her up long after she should have pulled the curtains against the perpetual sun and gone to bed.
At about six hours forenote a strange dream came to her. She was standing before a tree whose trunk was a hexagonal pillar, and around it was twined a snake with Magister Pregaldin’s eyes. It looked at her mockingly, then took its tail in its mouth.
She woke with the dream vivid in her mind. Lying there thinking, she remembered a story he had told her, about some Capellan magister named Kekule, who had deduced the ringlike structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake. She smiled with the thought that she had just had Kekule’s dream.
Then she bounded out of bed and out her door, pounding down the spiral steps to the kitchen. Hunter and Maya were eating breakfast together when she erupted into the room.
“Hunter! Do you have any books on chemistry?” she said.
He regarded her as if she were demented. “Why?”
“I need to know about benzene!”
The two adults looked at each other, mystified. “I have an encyclopedia,” he said.
“Can I go borrow it?”
“No. I’ll find it for you. Now try to curb your enthusiasm for aromatic hydrocarbons till I’ve had my coffee.”
He sat there tormenting her for ten minutes till he was ready to go up to his office and find the book for her. She took the disk saying, “Thanks, you’re the best!” and flew upstairs with it. As soon as she found the entry on benzene her hunch was confirmed: it was a hexagonal ring of carbon atoms with hydrogens attached at the corners. By replacing hydrogens with different molecules you could create a bewildering variety of compounds.