Rajasundaran alone enjoyed going head-to-head with the team's problem child. Indifferent to the drama of human personality, he savored each clash with the Armenian as if it were a good cricket test match.
We ought to make it, he said one day, so that closing the shutters actually dampens all the ambient sounds coming from outside the bedroom windows.
Kaladjian went for the easy kill. A pointless exercise. A complete
waste of processing power.
No, it's interesting. What might damping do to create a sense of
inside and out?
Don't ask vapid questions, Kaladjian said.
What is your algorithm for telling vapid questions from their opposites? Jackdaw held up his hands in a T. Please, guys. We can't afford to start with the philosophy stuff, again.
Kaladjian ignored the chance for peace with honor. A vapid question is one that any mature researcher recognizes as fruitless. You are willing to be ruled by consensus? You? All right. Then it's one where the answer serves no end but itself. Raj studied Kaladjian's face, as if he were his own portrait. When you look at the Pythagorean theorem, when you draw it graphically…? When you actually build little squares on each side, why should the two smaller squares be equal in area to the largest one? Is that a vapid question?
Yes. Kaladjian smiled, even as the trap took shape.
But it is also a profound question as well?
Well. That depends.
Spiegel waved his arms, drawing fire. There are no vapid questions.
Only vapid questioners.
May I ask you one? Adie asked Kaladjian. Probably vapid? What exactly is your problem?
Kaladjian blinked condescension. His smile easily absorbed the attack. I suppose you find me largely contemptuous.
Pretty much, Adie chirped.
The kind of mutual flaming that enlivened a good Multi-User Dimension turned Jackdaw's stomach when it occurred face-to-face. Maybe we should put all this human stuff back in the box and get on with our work?
The others humored him. Hours later, with the project scattered for the day, Adie cornered Kaladjian in his immaculate cubicle. So tell me.
Kaladjian looked up, waiting. And what exactly would you like me to tell you?
Why you're at war with the rest of creation.
The Armenian appraised her for the length of a short syllogism. Is that what I am?
Yes.
He thought for a minute. You wouldn't understand.
Adie swallowed the stream of ready profanity that welled up in her throat. Try me with the dumbed-down version.
Something in the challenge appealed to him. He gestured for her to sit, then turned his back on her and gazed out his window into the rain-dripped woods. You know what I do for a living?
Something to do with numbers.
His laugh condensed to a bitter nib. I've told you already, young woman. Everything has something to do with numbers.
Not young, she said.
The silence lasted long enough for Adie to think she'd been dismissed. Then he broke it, addressing the plate glass.
Say the thing that gives you more pleasure than anything in existence is to arrange a set of colored marbles according to strict and surprisingly sparse rules. God knows why, but the pastime fascinates you. So long as you're not hungry or cold or otherwise impaired, you want to devote yourself to it.
Painting, she said. Something like painting.
The hardest kind of painting. The most accountable. The more you push the marbles around, the harder it is to get them into interesting configurations. But you're not alone in the pursuit. A handful of other devotees have the same obsession. Everyone looks over one another's work, fixing and extending. You memorize all the beautiful moves of the grand masters. This goes on for a few thousand years. Every so often, someone stumbles onto a hidden wrinkle, one that puts the marbles into a surprise configuration, special, pleasing, something no one expected.
Each of them stared off at an altarpiece the other couldn't see.
Then, out of the blue, someone discovers that the marble game is a profound reformulation of an interlocking canister game, unknown to you, played by another circle of monks centuries ago on the other side of the world and shelved as a useless curiosity. These two unrelated, formally beautiful pursuits turn out to be, in a deep, singular, and unsought way, synonymous.
She nodded toward some analogy. The concealed and ubiquitous
golden mean.
A truly shattering insight descends on some master practitioner. Colored marbles and interlocking canisters, taken together, form a perfect translation of phenomena in the physical world. The patterns of marbles and canisters compose a map of, say, the cycle of tides or the bends in a river. And this correspondence works, not only after the fact, but in advance of it The game makes it possible to predict all kinds of otherwise unknown, otherwise unlooked-for, otherwise immeasurable
events…
Her neck hairs rose up, obeying their own rules. Every repeated time without exception, the harmless, artificial game advances in absolute lockstep with measurable event. The implications are inescapable. The marbles and the canisters — the simple but rigorous rules — somehow embody physical reality.
The veil fell, and she stood looking on this abandoned man. She did not know how he managed to remain behind, in such pain.
These inconsequential games mimic the most grandiose patterns we can identify. Gravity, time, light: name your fundament. Creation keeps to a few simple rules of interlocking shape and color, patterns replicating themselves across impossible distances. This is what the mathematician calls beauty. An ever more elaborate edifice spun out of the sparest symmetries. A perfection that outstrips all attempts to capture it.
She put up her palms in puzzlement. This is a bad thing?
He turned to her, his edge of aggression again sharpening. He stood and beckoned for her to follow, out the room and down the hall. They reached the Cavern, where Sybil Stance was taking her rightful slot on
the sign-up sheet.
We have an emergency, Kaladjian said. We need the machine.
Aril I'm right in the middle of— Please. Ten minutes. You can have my hour tomorrow. He booted up an environment Adie had never seen. A shape like a Cycladic figure mushroomed in front of them. Kaladjian put the wand through an unaccompanied partita. The figure metamorphosed, its planes sliding upon itself, turning inside out in a virtuoso conjuring act of knotted space.
All legitimate topological transformations of one another, he said. Adie nodded, hooked. She saw a centaur. The torso of a naked Aphrodite. A wondrous stalactite. A nexus of ribbonlike tubes passing through their own surfaces. Proteus, unholdable. We're going in, Kaladjian announced.
The figure swelled in the air around them, and they passed inside. When they steadied out again, they found themselves riding along the inside edge of a secret junction of knotted expressway lanes, the deeply entangled passages of a decadent queen conch. Brace yourself.