“W-r-r-rar-r.” Claws gestured across the floor.
Ginny said, wide-eyed with awe: “He wants to write . . . Svartalf, listen. Don’t be angry. Don’t be afraid. Let him do what he will. Don’t fight, help him. When this is over, you’ll have more cream and sardines than you can eat. I promise. There’s a good cat.” She rubbed him under the chin. It didn’t seem quite the proper treatment for a visiting savant, but it worked, because at last he purred.
While she and Griswold made preparations, I concentrated on meshing with Lobachevsky. The rest stood around, shaken by what had happened and the sudden complete unknownness of the next hour. A fraction of me hearkened to their low voices.
Charles: “Damnedest apparition of saints I ever heard of.”
Karlslund: “Admiral, please!”
Jan ice: “Well, it’s true. They shouldn’t have intruded in bodies like, like demons taking possession.”
Griswold: “Maybe they had to. We did neglect to provide counter-transferral mass for inter-continuum crossing.”
Karlslund: “They aren’t devils. They never required it in the past.”
Barney: “Whoa. Let’s think about that. A spirit or a thought can travel free between universes. Maybe that’s what returned saints always were—visions, not solid bodies.”
Karlslund: “Some were positively substantial.”
Nobu: “I would guess that a saint can utilize any mass to form a body. Air, for instance, and a few pounds of dust for minerals, would provide the necessary atoms. Don’t forget what he or she is, as far as we know: a soul in Heaven, which is to say one near God.
How can he fail to gain remarkable abilities as well as spiritual eminence—from the Source of power and creativity?”
Charles: “What ails these characters, then?”
“Messieurs,” my body said, stepping toward them, “I beg your indulgence. As yet I have not entirely accustomed myself to thinking in this corporeal manifold. Do me the honor to remember that it is unlike the one I originally inhabited. Nor have I assimilated the details of the problem which led to your request for help. Finally, while confined to human form, I have no better means than you for discovering the identity of the gentleman in the cat. I do believe I know his purpose, but let us wait, if you will, for more exact knowledge before drawing conclusions.”
“Wow,” Barney breathed. “How’s it feel, Steve?”
“Not bad,” I said. “Better by the minute.” That was an ultimate understatement. As Lobachevsky and I got acquainted, I felt in myself, coexistent with my own thoughts and emotions, those of a being grown good and wise beyond imagining.
Of course, I couldn’t share his afterlife, nor the holiness thereof. My mortal brain and grimy soul didn’t reach to it. At most, there sang at the edge of perception a peace and joy which were not static but a high eternal adventure. I did, though, have the presence of Lobachevsky the man to savor. Think of your oldest and best friend and you’ll have a rough idea what that was like.
“We should be ready now,” Ginny said.
She and Griswold had set a Ouija board on a bench, the easiest implement for a paw to operate. She perched herself on the edge, swinging legs whose shapeliness my associate noticed too, though mainly he worked out in my head the equation describing them. Svartalf took position at the gadget while I leaned across the opposite side to interrogate.
The planchette moved in a silence broken only by breathing. It was sympathetic with a piece of chalk under a broomstick spell, that wrote large on a blackboard where everyone could see.
ICH BIN JANOS BOLYAI VON UNGARN
“Bolyai!” gasped Falkenberg. “God, I forgot about him! No wonder he—but how—”
“Enchante, Monsieur,” Lobachevsky said with a low bow. “Dies ist fur mich eine grosse Ehre. Ihrer Werke sint eine Inspiration fur apes.” He meant it.
Neither Bolyai nor Svartalf were to be outdone in courtliness. They stood up on his hind legs, made a reverence with paw on heart, followed with a military salute, took the planchette again and launched into a string of flowery French compliments.
“Who is he, anyhow?” Charles hissed behind me.
“I . . . I don’t know his biography,” Falkenberg answered likewise. “But I recall now, he was the morning star of the new geometry.”
“I’ll check the library, ’ Griswold offered. “These courtesies look as if they’ll go on for some time.”
“Yes,” Ginny said in my ear, “can’t you hurry things along a bit? We’re way overdue at home, you and I. And that phone call could be trouble.”
I put it to Lobachevsky, who put it to Bolyai, who wrote ABER NATUERLICH for the lack of an umlaut and gave us his assurances—at considerable length that as an Imperial officer he had learned how to act with the decisiveness that became a soldier when need existed, as it clearly did in the present instance, especially when two such charming young ladies in distress laid claim upon his honor, which honor he would maintain upon any field without flinching, as he trusted he had done in life ....
I don’t intend to mock a great man. Among us, he was a soul trying to think with the brain and feel with the nerves and glands of a tomcat. It magnified human failings and made well-nigh impossible the expression of his intellect and knightliness. We found these hinted at in the notes on him that Griswold located in encyclopedias and mathematical histories, which we read while he did his gallant best to communicate with Lobachevsky.
Janos Bolyai was born in Hungary in 1802, when it was hardly more than a province of the Austrian Empire. His father, a noted mathematician who was a close friend of Gauss, taught him calculus and analytical mechanics before he was thirteen and enrolled him in the Royal Engineering College in Vienna at fifteen. Twenty years old, he became an officer of engineers, well known as a violinist and a swordsman dangerous to meet in a duel. In 1823 he sent to his father a draft of his Absolute Science of Space. While Gauss had anticipated some of its ideas in a general, philosophical way—unknown at the time to Bolyai, the young Hungarian had he done the first rigorous treatment of a non-Euclidean geometry, the first solid proof that space doesn’t logically need to obey axioms like the one about parallel lines.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t published till 1833, and just as an appendix to a two-volume work of his father’s which, being in Latin, bore the gorgeous title Tentatem Juventutem Studiosarn, in Edementa Matheseos Puree Introducendi. By then Lobachevsky had independently announced similar results. Bolyai remained obscure.
It seemed to have discouraged him. He settled down in the same place as his father, who taught at the Reformed College of Maros-Vasahely, and- died there in 1860. His lifetime covered a rising Hungarian nationalism, Kossuth’s rebellion in 1848, its failure and the reactionary oppression that followed; but the articles said nothing about his conduct or opinions. He did see the end of martial law in 1857 and the increasing liberalization afterward: though his land did not achieve full national status under the dual monarchy till seven years past his death. I wondered if his ghost had hung around that long, waiting, before it departed for wider universes.
We found more on Lobachevsky. He was born in 1793, in Nizhni Novgorod. His mother was widowed when he was seven. She moved to Kazan and raised her boys in genteel but often desperate poverty. They won scholarships to the Gymnasium, Nikolai at the age of eight. He entered the local university at fourteen, got his master’s degree at eighteen, was appointed assistant professor at twenty-one and full professor at twenty-three. Presently he had charge of the library and the museum. It was a tough distinction—both were neglected, disordered, so short of funds that he had to do most of the sheer physical labor himself—but over the years he made them a pride of Russia. In addition, while Czar Alexander lived, he was supposed to keep tabs on student politics. He managed to satisfy the government without finking; the kids adored him.