The Secret Mathematic

 

CHAPTER ONE

Dragana Zoranovic is the prettiest girl in town, but she won't be for long.

No one has any idea what is to come. The universe may have its own suspicions, but it holds its cards close. Tomorrow can be like that: as inevitable as inscrutable, as obvious as a lottery after the draw.

(The future is usually likely, but seldom sure.)

Doroslovo is a small place. The main intersection and the way over the bridge are cobblestoned, but the rest of the roads are packed dirt or gravel. The houses are humble, thatched and shuttered and moldering, but connected to the sagging lines of utility poles and lit at night by the flashing glow of television. To the north are the tall steeples of Sombar, blue on the horizon. To the south is an elbow of the Danube, constricted and fast, steered between ancient stone walls, its throaty hiss a constant backdrop to village life.

The bridge is flanked by two tanks. Their crews are jocular, well-fed young men from Belgrade. They swear loudly and laugh. They spend a lot of money at the bar but never leave tips. When they get bored of staring at the empty road they sometimes shoot stray cats or patronize Vasa if she's awake.

(Those six guys are putting Vasa's son through school. Also, there are more rats poking around than there used to be. Unintended consequences, both.)

It has become fashionable to move away to Budapest, so many of the houses in Doroslovo are empty. Kids sneak inside to screw around, to smoke stolen cigarettes or sip stolen liquor, to piss on abandoned kipple. Some of the houses have bomb shelters dug in beneath them, sometimes the product of a well-groomed, methodical paranoia and sometimes instead rude, improvised holes inspired by immediate fear.

(The country is coming apart, after all. Anything might happen. Unexpected events become probable when exchanges of heavy ordnance are involved. It's worse than guessing the weather.)

A couple of black-haired boys loiter at the window of the abandoned house that is neighbour to the Zoranovic cottage. They know Dragana's comings and goings, and mark their day by them, waiting for their chance to drink her in as she passes by and then touch themselves, streaking the sill. Sreten and Stevan are best friends, and they do everything together.

It's cloudy.

"Why don't we open the curtains?" says Dragana as she walks inside the cottage, pushing her bags from the market onto the kitchen counter. "It's like a cave in here."

"You know why," snaps her mother, Danica. She was handsome before she became hard. She still bothers to make herself up, and her house clothes are fashionable mail-orders from Novi Sad. Her chin is high. She sits on the sofa, a cold cup of tea laced in her long fingers, her painted-on eyebrows arched. Danica continues, "If we take them off now, we'll forget to put one of them back tonight. Bombers will see them, and then kaput -- me, you, your brother: ashes."

Dragana rolls her eyes. "Nobody's bombing Doroslovo, Mama."

"It's a war. You can't know."

Danica is anxious to see the proofs that have come through the post, anxious to see whether the money she has paid a lecher in Sombar is well-spent. She lights a cigarette and flips through the stack of large format glossies, scowling dramatically but nodding all the while. Twin streams of curling smoke jet from her nostrils. "You're gorgeous in these," she decides, eyes lingering critically over the last print. She looks up. "It would be noble to say thank you."

"Thank you, Mama."

Dragana's eyes are on her lap. She doesn't want to see the proofs. She spins her fingers together and twists them into shapes.

CHAPTER TWO

It's 1960. You can tell because everyone's hair looks funny.

"Mother of Hell," groans Fleuve. Her hair is long and straight and black, clumped into ropes by smears of vomit that steams in the winter morning air. Her knees shudder and then buckle. She hits the pavement and retches into the slush-clogged gutter.

The passersby give Fleuve wide berth. Nobody offers her help. They avert their eyes. They assume she's drunk.

When she's recovered her breath she steadies herself against a newspaper box, then checks herself in a shop window reflection. The other girls have loaned her their best, so she almost looks as if she belongs in this part of the city: overcoat, stohl, scarf, fur-trim boots, matching purse. She looks respectable, except for the stringy bile freezing into her hair. And, of course, except for her race.

She unfolds a scrap of paper, glances at it for the tenth time. She searches for the address through the haze of swirling snow, the bustle of rumbling trolleys and fin-tailed cars, the sparkling screen of tear-clung lashes. She feels like all the people who refuse to look at her are staring...

The doctor's office is so clean it looks like a movie set. The people waiting there look like actors from breakfast cereal commercials, rosy-cheeked kids fussing at the hem of mother's skirt. The nurse at the desk looks up and offers Fleueve a sort of mock-apologetic half-smile. "I think you're looking for..." she starts airily.

"Doctor Fleischer," Fleuve finishes.

"I'm sorry, we're not taking new patients at this time."

"I have an appointment. A quarter after nine. It's arranged."

The nurse purses her lips dubiously. "Is that so?"

It is, and soon enough Fleuve is pinioned in one of the waiting room's cruel wooden chairs, staring down blankly at a copy of the National Geographic Journal on her lap. There's a great white shark on the cover, roiling out of the surf, its mouth stained by prey. A new wave of nausea tugs at Fleuve's throat. She coughs tightly, eyes winced shut.

She's called. The nurse escorts her to a cold examination room. "Get undressed," she says, tossing a cotton gown on the table. She pauses on her way out, lingering half-turned at the jamb. "Everything in this room is accounted for, naturally. We'll notice if anything goes missing."

"Thank you," Fleuve whispers, then burps behind her hand.

The doctor doesn't speak during the examination except to give orders: breathe in, breathe out, turn over, unclench. His voice is crisp and expressionless. His hands are firm and dry, his instruments frigid metal. Fleuve swallows back bile as her stomach bucks. She does her best to comply quickly, and to gasp quietly or bite her lip when need be. She stares at the ceiling tiles, counting the holes.

In his office Doctor Fleischer sits behind a wide desk and studies his own notes. Fleuve sits opposite him, legs crossed and eyes down. He flips a page in her thin file. "Your breed tends to obesity," he says abruptly. "Considering that fact of your physiology you're far too skinny. You're eating for two now, and that means doubling up on protein. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Doctor Fleischer."

"Do you know what protein is? I'm talking about meat."

"Yessir. I try to eat, sir, but I get sick."

"Do you smoke?" he asks, taking out an ivory and pearl cigarette case.

"No thank you."

He chuckles, then lights his cigarette with a match. "I wasn't offering you anything, Miss Mississauga, I was asking a medical question."

"I'm sorry, Doctor Fleischer."

"Well?"

"Nossir, I don't smoke no cigarettes."

He makes a note. The back of his hand is hairy. Fleuve takes quick stock of where she will direct her vomit if she's overcome. She decides on a tin trash can beside the desk. The doctor breathes out a long, thin stream of smoke and then puts his pen aside and folds his hands on his blotter. "I won't be surprised if your bloodwork comes back showing malnutrition. You simply must make the attempt to rise up, Miss Mississauga, and take care of yourself properly. I know the disposition of your race doesn't make that easy, but this is Dean Willoughby's concern as well as your own."

"Yessir. I'm really grateful to Dean for arranging this here with you."

"You should be grateful to Dean for more than that. I understand he's putting you up, and seeing to your groceries? I've advised him, medically, on the correct course of action but as I'm sure you know he takes his Catholicism very seriously and therefore will not listen. Thus, it is up to us -- up to you in particular, Miss Mississauga -- to look after this situation in a way we can be proud of. Don't you agree?"

"Of course, Doctor Fleischer. I never wanted to...to end it."

"That's fortunate considering Dean's stance," the doctor concedes. "The point is that we need to get you eating again. Now I'll tell you candidly that nine times out of ten the main culprit in morning sickness is simple feminine hysteria, but in extreme cases science does have some options."

"Like what, Doctor Fleischer?"

"Drug therapy. Have you ever heard of Kevadon? Of course you haven't. It's based on thalidomide, a very powerful relaxation agent developed in Germany. The prescription isn't inexpensive, however, but the results can't be argued. I'm going to recommend Dean get you on it as soon as possible. If I know him at all he'll meet you at the pharmacy with his chequebook if you want to call him now."

The doctor pushes his black telephone forward on the desk, but as Fleuve leans in to take the receiver he blocks her hand. "Dean Willoughby has been my patient for twenty years. His wife is my patient. His kids are my patients. So before we do this I need to know something, Miss Mississauga: I need to know, honest to Christ, whether this baby belongs to him."

"Sure," says Fleuve. "Sure it's his. It could only be his, sir. I swear."

The doctor looks her in the eye, hesitates, and then draws away from the black telephone and sits back in his chair. "Go ahead," he says, gesturing at the receiver with the short end of his cigarette. "I'll begin the paperwork."

She dials in the numbers. The line clicks and whirs.

"Hello? Dean? It's me," whispers Fleuve. "Is it alright to...? Alright. Yes, yes I'm here with him now. I'm in his office." She pauses, cocking her head as she listens. She lets herself smile when she tells him: "Doctor Fleischer says he might have a drug that can help me. Ain't that swell?"

She twirls her long hair, unconsciously flicking aside flakes of dried bile as she smooths out the knots.

CHAPTER THREE

"Herr von Steissbein, I salute you!"

The Turk pours another round of his unspeakable liquor into the bottom of each greasy glass. Albert pinches his violin under one arm to take his, then all four men tilt back their heads and drink. Three of them wince, but the Turk smiles.

"It's vile!" swears Conrad, wiping the residue from his moustache. "Is it Turkish?"

"I have told you, I am not from Turkey," grins the Turk, teeth gleaming in a swarthy face framed by a black Van Dyke beard. "And you drink like a small child, Herr Habicht."

Maurice laughs, then coughs. "Oh my Hell it's terrible stuff," he agrees between hacking giggles. "But in Romania we have worse. My grandfather once fermented a cow-pie for liquor, I swear it's true."

(Nobody believes him, which is appropriate since it is a lie.)

Albert places his violin and bow inside their case with exquite care, snaps fast the lid, then stumbles drunkenly into the side of the kitchen table and crashes to his knees. His friends guffaw. He cautiously stands, bracing himself against the back of Conrad's chair as he reaches for his pipe fixings. "Will someone at this time please read out the minutes prior to our little musical hiatus?"

"You are a man of remarkable focus, Her von Steissbein," says the Turk.

"At this time I remain unmarried," admits Albert. Everyone roars.

The laughter dies quickly. The tone in the cramped little flat has changed now that Albert has called for the minutes. Conrad puts his spectacles back on and consults the notes on the table. Albert takes a seat in his moth-eaten throne. Maurice notices that the forgotten music is skipping, and leans over to reset the needle on the Zonophone. He straightens and blinks attentively, blowing crumbs away through his moustache.

(It's 1904. You can tell because of the wallpaper. And the moustaches.)

Conrad reads out the minutes. The young men stroke their moustaches. Albert strikes a match to light his pipe, then wobbles precariously on his seat. He crosses his eyes and with a stubborn effort completes the task, then puffs contentedly. "Do you know how I know this to be true?" he asks when Conrad has finished. "Because it's beautiful. Only God is so elegant."

Maurice snorts. "You sound like a Pythagoran."

"You've never heard of a Jewish Pythagoran?"

"If we follow the thought experiment to its natural conclusion," says Maurice, "the symmetry is ultimately broken. It's no longer a matter of -- elegant, as you put it -- duality when one is but a tangled property of the first. They're not exchangeable so much as disentangleable."

Conrad shakes his head as he takes out a cigar. "That's sophistry. As far as the mathematics are concerned the two are perfect equivalents. Albert is right: it is a peek into God's blueprints." He strikes a match, his face revealed in a brief, bright glow.

Maurice frowns. "That's romance. That's Pythagoran. That's confusing your awe for the perfection of numbers for divine awe. One is a model, one is Creation itself. It's a kind of intoxication, and it can only drive your point of view further from reason."

The Turk clears his throat. "Permit me to raise, then, a comparatively pragmatic consideration." The others turn to look at him, brows open. He continues, "If indeed there is a primal equivalence between matter and energy, what if men learned to trade them at will?"

Maurice considers this, waving Conrad's cigar smoke away from his short, angular nose. "The tools to build matter are beyond our reach. In a dozen centuries, perhaps, but at present it is inconceivable in any frame save unrestrained fantasy. Suddenly we leap from mathematics to Jules Verne."

Albert nods, his pipe bobbing. "It might be understood, but not realized."

Conrad draws on his cigar, eyes flitting. "But the same cannot be said of the opposite: to unweave matter into its constituent energies. That, my friends, might be done, if crudely. It would be an act of blind, high-energy violence, an order of magnitude beyond apes smashing open nuts with rocks. Never the less..."

Albert is still nodding, his eyes half-closed. "...If one were to secure a critical quantity of an appropriately giddy isotope -- of thorium, perhaps, or uranium."

"It could be boiled in a neutron ray!" cries Maurice, standing up from his seat and grabbing at his hair. He pauses from his histrionics suddenly, brow crinkling. "But it's impossible. How could the energy ever be harvested? Any experiment would devastate the laboratory!"

"The key, then, would be a kind of ultimate kiln," adds Conrad excitedly, "a crucible for withstanding the concussion of the phase transition, incorporating a turbine apparatus for converting the heat into work!"

"An atomic furnace, in other words," agrees Albert between pipe puffs, his dark-haired head lost in a swirl of smoke.

The Turk chuckles drily. "You are gentlemen, you tender boys, and you forget what most men are like. While you djinnis of numerology jump immediately to harvesting the energies released, the natural man has already stopped thinking. His conclusion: why contain the energies at all?"

"What possible purpose would that serve?" asks Albert, pipe momentarily forgotten.

The Turk's face tightens seriously. "Destruction," he says. "Why struggle to design an atomic locomotive when you can wipe your enemies from the face of the world using Hell's own breath?"

"Jesus Christ, Herr Siraj," interrupts Conrad, "no one is that mad! Barbarians in your Oriental deserts, perhaps, but not men of tools and opportunity."

The Turk smirks. "No civilization is beyond sin, Herr Habicht." He turns away from Conrad, withdrawing his own cigar from a pocket of his ornate velvet coat. "My real question, however, is this: should it be shown that such a method for unleashing unrestrained energies from matter could be realized as a mechanical reality, whose moral responsibility would be the first bomb?" He paces in a tight circle, squaring with each of the young men's eyes in turn. "If there were a holocaust of atomic devastation, who would be its true author -- the man who riveted closed the casing? Or, perhaps instead, you?"

This question hangs in the smoky apartment for a long moment. The Turk sucks on his cigar, gaze cast out the grimy little window and into the square, at the silhouetted spires of Berne occluding the lowest stars.

Albert says, "Science is not secret."

"That's right," agrees Maurice quickly. "Only in an environment of open collaboration can we make progress. History proves it! Utter transparency is paramount. Science can have no borders -- national, ethnic, religious, military, superstitious."

"In this way science has friends instead of allies or enemies," adds Conrad, gesturing emphatically then hitting the table and making the glasses jump. "In this way it remains an enterprise to serve all mankind!"

The Turk's brow arches. "And so science is absolved of any application of her pursuits? She is untainted by any crime her knowledge engenders?"

The flat is quiet again. Outside the window the city is quiet, too. The sun will be coming up soon. The air is cold. The first farmer's horse-carts are plodding their way to the markets, lonely iron footfalls echoing off the building fronts.

Eventually Albert stirs, putting aside his dead pipe. "You have given us something to think about, Herr Siraj." He turns to face the Turk. "For that I thank you from the bottom of my heart," he says, then yawns. "But now I have to sleep. I'm due at the patent office in just a few hours."

The others have already risen. Conrad puts on his hat and rubs his eyes. Maurice is spilling into his overcoat, his cigar perched on the edge of the table. The Turk watches the preparations and then ceremoniously sees them to the hall with Albert. He pauses then, watching the friends leave. "Herr von Steissbein," he whispers, "I have more to discuss with you. This matter is of principal concern to my father."

"The meeting is over," says Albert, leaning into the doorjamb wearily. "And I leave my presidential name in the drawer, next to the Olympian Academy minutes." He gestures vaguely behind him at the notes on the cluttered kitchen table. He frowns, because one of the notes has begun smouldering on account of Maurice's forgotten cigar.

"I have more to say on the subject of secrets," the Turk persists.

Albert turns back to him, smoothing down his black moustache anxiously. "You must excuse me, Herr Siraj, but I believe my kitchen is on fire." He begins to close the door, bowing ceremoniously. "This is a discussion we can take up at our next meeting. You are invited, of course. It was a delight to have you with us." He sniffs worriedly. "I really must say goodnight now."

The Turk bows in turn, his mouth a tight, resigned line. "I thank you for your hospitality, Herr Einstein." The door clicks closed. "Until then."

CHAPTER FOUR

They live in a shrine.

It is a tattered, streak-stained, dust-clogged, drafty and dank temple -- surrounded by the cattle mews of indigent thousands, inundated from all quarters by their rank animal reek: black and yellow bile, yeast, halitosis, jealousy, fear.

This is a displaced persons camp. None of its denizens are prisoners in any technical sense, yet the barbed-wire boundaries are patrolled by heavy tanks. They have blue and white NATO star logos peeking out from beneath the splatters and scratches. Crudely marked in the grime itself are the names the soldiers give their shells: one tank is inscribed MY SO-CALLED LIFE, and another, ENTERPRISE.

(It's 1994. You can tell by the geopolitical situation.)

There are endless rows of tents with narrow trenches of dried muck between them. There are barren flagpoles, fixtures clanging in the breeze. They used to have flags on them, but the flags upset too many people so they came down.

What would be the point of flying the banner of a defunct nation? There's no such place as Yugoslavia anymore. The dirt beneath the people's heels is nameless now, adrift in cartographic limbo.

(The dirt doesn't know the difference, but the displaced persons do.)

Here, the Zoranovics live in a shrine, dedicated to memory and loss, not of countrymen or country but for a daughter. The Zoranovic tent stands as a material homage to Dragana, her lush eyes and full lips shining out in glossy colour from photographs pinned to every available surface.

If one were a very pretty girl it might seem like a convoluted hall of mirrors: to anyone else it is a haunted place marked by a dead teenager's paper stare; inside we are hemmed in by a phantasmagoric array of Dragana's beauty marks, pink nipples, curving back and supple shoulders; her virginally unblemished navel and her coquettishly trimmed mons pubis; her expressions of earnestly simulated desire, her brow crinkled ambiguously between agony and ecstasy.

"She had so much talent," whispers Danica, her long fingers clenched in prayer. "She had such a future." Her gaunt face twitches. "I am robbed."

A rumble sounds.

Danica leaps to her feet. "Get down, Drago!" she screams. "Put your head between your knees!"

Drago doesn't move. "It's just the train, Mama," he says.

She slaps him.

The boy reels but does not lose his seat. On the stool before him is a scrap of cardboard coloured crudely with a checker pattern, the squares occupied by bottlecaps and shell casings, pebbles and bolts. Calmly he reaches out and slides a rusty wing-nut diagonally across the board, then looks up expectantly at the empty bed opposite him.

Danica starts to cry. She touches his cheek and smooths down his bramble of black hair, then tugs on his rumpled sleeves and flicks a flake of dirt from the collar. "I'm so sorry, Drago," she whimpers, looking nowhere.

"It's okay, Mama."

She takes out a cigarette with shaking hands and pushes out of the tent, pulling her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. Drago watches her go, then turns back to face Dragana. "It's your move," he says.

She bites her lip, searching the board. She touches a bottlecap, lingers over it, then changes her mind and withdraws her hand. It's the hand on her ruined side so she instinctively tucks it into the folds of her skirt, the twisted scars modestly hidden from sight. "Anything I do will open me up to your check," she tells her brother.

"There are two ways out," prompts Drago helpfully. "Do you want a hint?"

"No." She studies the board. "I'll find them."

And she will. Drago knows her solution algorithms like the back of his hand, and he can see from the way her eyes flick from the bolt to the thimble that she's near the precipice of a move that will unlock the virtual stalemate they can both see two turns ahead. As she considers the situation she keeps the burned side of her face turned to the wall, so that Drago can only see the fringes of the filigree of scar tissue that crisscrosses her skin in snaking lines like a dried river bed.

Drago is almost nine. Dragana would be seventeen if she weren't dead.

She makes her move. It is not optimal. Drago pushes a shell casing forward. "Check."

Dragana's ghost cannot speak, but Drago understands her words anyway. In the ten months since the landmine exploded beside her he has learned to read the mute workings of her throat, the bat of her doe-like eyes, the information implied in the way she caresses a particular piece she feels holds a potent move in its future history.

They have between them a language of chess, expressed in a vocabulary of moves actual, virtual, possible and unrealized, suggested by micro-motions, fleeting looks and swallowed sighs, a library of innuendo and speculation built within the framework of their games.

It has been six months since the Canadian doctor told Danica her mine-mangled daughter had acute lymphocytic leukaemia, to which just three months later Dragana succumbed. In the end she was deaf, exhausted and tortured. Bruises bloomed wherever she leaned, even for a moment. Her head ached constantly. She could not hold down food.

There are few medicines to be had while shells fly.

The Canadian computer is broken, and it refuses to accept that Dragana is gone. The soldiers still distribute three meal ticket books to the family, one with each of their names: Zoranovic comma Danica, Drago, Dragana. They get water for three, and an extra dose of vitamins. To avoid interrupting this material boon, Danica and Drago are used to playing along, used to pretending Dragana is just out of sight, or has stepped out on her way elsewhere.

(Dragana's not dead -- she's just peeing.)

This is what gets Drago wondering how the universe knows about Dragana. There is the paperwork -- somewhere an official death certificate, perhaps lost in the post -- and the ashes, of course, but aside from these artifacts Dragana's death is only an idea entertained inside the minds of the Zoranovic family and their closest friends in the camp. According to the world at large Dragana drinks and eats, takes showers and uses soap, signs her name and stays out of trouble. She is a good, if shy, girl.

The games of chess between Drago and Dragana continue unabated. Drago is intimately acquainted with Dragana's problem solving sieves, and he applies them in a sequence he finds credible against memory. This is how he generates her moves, which are statistically indistinguishable from moves she might have made were she still actively making decisions.

The ongoing reconfiguration of the board is a dedicated simulcrum of how this little corner of the world would continue to change states in the presence of the actual Dragana. It is a shrine within a shrine, and this is where Drago lives: powering the Dragana chess engine with his mind.

He wonders how much of the universe must be touched for an idea to become a fact. If he and his mother can convince themselves that they really do see her, would her death have left any mark at all on the world?

Does God know she is dead?

Drago is nearly nine, but he is brave. He decides to hide his sister's death from reality. He will lend his shade to whatever shadow of an existence she's connected to. He can eat her food and his mother can sell the vitamins. He can rumple her bed, and wash her clothes, and do her chores. He can play out her chess games, and thereby converse with her virtual self.

"Mama seems especially anxious today," Dragana tells him.

Drago looks over at her. "I wouldn't have noticed that."

"I think she's heard from our father. This is how she gets."

"I want to meet him."

"She'll never allow it."

"I might like him."

"That's what she's afraid of, Drago."

Dragana's ghost is wrong. Her mother is not in communication with Ratko Zoranovic. Instead Danica has left to retrieve the results from the tests Drago took at the NATO base. She is sure they will say that her poor boy is retarded, and cautiously optimistic that this will qualify her for additional assistance. She is worried, however, about any scrutiny of her family situation lest she lose her daughter's share. She despises herself for the priorities she is forced to keep.

The military psychologist is young and handsome: auburn hair, steely eyes, a hard jaw. His hands look soft. Danica surreptiously prises her old wedding ring from her finger and drops it into a pocket. The psychologist looks up. "Mrs. Zoranovic --"

"I go by Zoran, actually. I'm not the son of anyone. It is my dead husband's name. I'd drop it but my father's is worse."

He smiles politely if fleetingly as she takes a seat. He toys with the boy's file, flipping pages randomly. "I'd like to discuss your son's WISC scores with you."

"He's been kept out of school, you know. It isn't his fault. It's been so hard for us."

"There's no need to be defensive, Mrs. Zoran."

"I know he's slow. I'm protective."

The psychologist looks up sharply. "Slow?"

"I'm sorry I don't know the correct word for this. An idiot?"

"Your son is no idiot, Mrs. Zoran."

"A moron?"

"No, no. What I'm trying to say is that he's exceptional."

"Exceptional?"

He puts the file aside and smiles reassuringly. "A genius, as it were," he says. "Gifted, you might say. Highly intelligent, if somewhat less than well-rounded."

The skin between Danica's eyes crinkles, briefly an echo of her daughter's desire as plastered around the family tent. She is not aroused but confused. She is sure this is a mistake. She is sure this will mean nothing for her. She is aghast.

"Would you like a glass of water, Mrs. Zoran?"

She smiles bleakly. "Yes, thank you."

CHAPTER FIVE

Creek chops wood.

Each fresh division echoes far in the still, morning air. He hefts the hatchet again, spins it, swoops it home: thock!

It is otherwise quiet. This is the furthest edge of the reserve, backing on the glen, tucked away under a smeared-out, sun-dappled border of shadow from old, old maples. The house is small and sagging, its front and back gardens museums of grass-choked kipple: rusted engines, empty bottles, torn tarpulins, cigarette butts and woodscrap.

Creek Edges isn't wearing a shirt. He never wears a shirt. His brown chest glistens with sweat, painted through with a run of grey ash trailing from the cigarette jammed into a corner of his mouth. He raises the hatchet with a grunt. Thock!

The screen door squeaks. Creek turns, wiping his brow ineffectually with an equally moist forearm. He squints through his own smoke. "Hey," he says.

"Hey," says Sky, urging his wheelchair over the threshold. He frowns, twists his shoulders, leans left and then right; the chair rolls over the hump, bumping down into the grass.

Creek watches silently. "You're getting good at that, eh?"

"There's a trick to it," says the boy.

"There's a trick to everything," agrees Creek. He holds out the hatchet. "You want to help me some before we get breakfast?"

Sky manoeuvres closer. The boy has neither arms nor legs, so this simple act of locomotion involves prodigious effort, ratcheting the tall wheelchair wheels forward with a deft, alternating flick from each plastic artificial arm.

This condition -- known as phocomelia -- is but one of the effects thalidomide toxicity has wrought upon the young boy's form.

His artificial arms are described as "flesh-coloured" though they aren't anywhere near the same colour as Sky's light cocoa skin. They look as if they were thieved from a beautiful caucasian mannequin at some fancy department store display, modeling starched white briefs or all-in-one flannel pajamas.

He raises his plastic, caucasian arms and pinions the hatchet between the stiff, dead hands. If the tool falls it will cleave a gash in Sky's lap, but Creek doesn't move to interfere. He watches, nodding. "Attaboy, Sky," he mumbles around his cigarette. "Right on."

The kid's eyes narrow as he sizes up the log in front of him. He weighs the hatchet carefully, testing the friction of the grip, then raises it to his chin, takes a breath and pitches it high into the air. The hatchet keens softly as it spins, flashing in a shaft of sun, then drops to the dirt beside the log. Sky sighs. "Sorry, Dad."

"Ain't no rush," says Creek. He sits down on an old tire and draws a can of beer from a cooler on the grass. He cracks it, sips it, closes his eyes and listens to the breeze in the leaves.

Sky folds double, leaning against the chair's harnesses, straining to dangle his plastic limbs low enough to retrieve the hatchet. It takes him three tries. He carefully raises the tool once more and sits back, sizing up the trajectory again. He licks his lips.

Birds chirp.

The boy launches the hatchet. It strikes its mark but lacks the momentum to cut, instead bouncing away to clang against a pile of empty paint cans. Creek opens his eyes. "A little higher, maybe."

Sky says nothing. He nods curtly, eyes focused on the hatchet as he wheels himself over to where it fell. He picks it up on his first attempt this time. In another moment he's back in front of the chopping block, staring down his prey with an expression of profound concentration.

Creek watches him quietly. The boy looks tired. The skin under his eyes is puffy and purple, lined like an old man's pouches. He always looks tired. Sky's poisoned time in his mother's womb also granted him a handful of sleep disorders the eggheads in Toronto have fancy names for that Creek can never keep straight.

The long and the short of it is that they both live with the bane of Sky's night terrors. The boy screams his way through his dreams and Creek, for his part, makes sure he always goes to bed drunk enough to snore through it.

The hatchet falls again, a glancing blow. "Close," says Creek after a chug of beer. He crumples the can and tosses it over his shoulder, then leans down to the cooler to get another. "You wanna just forget about it for now, get something to eat?"

Sky shakes his head. "No," he says. "I can do it."

Creek nods. "Attaboy," he says again.

Thock! The log splits. Creek grins, utters a paint-peeling string of congratulatory swearing, then claps his son on the back and declares it meal-time. Sky smiles as he lets himself be pushed, his chair rattling as it is propelled back over the threshold by Creek's strong but unsteady hand. The wheelchair blasts down the hall and then skids across the grimy kitchen tiles, spinning out wildly as Creek cranks against the handles. "Remember when we used to tear around like this all the time, breaking shit and everything?"

Sky laughs. "Yeah," he says.

For breakfast Creek prepares fried bread and a can of pork and beans with melted cheese on top. He whistles aimlessly as he works at the stove, his sweaty back glistening, making his tattoos shine. "How bout some fishing after breakfast?" he asks over his shoulder, voice muffled by the crackling pan.

"Really?" exclaims Sky.

"For sure, really," says Creek, bringing the steaming pan to the table and pushing its contents onto Sky's plate with a half-melted spatula. "I know we had a tough time before, but I also know how good you get at something once you've had a chance to sleep on it. I got a good feeling about them fish today, boy. I think they're gonna be in a biting mood."

"What about school?"

"Screw school."

The boy's eyes light up. Creek looks away, wipes at his face with a rag. He sits down at the other end of the table and methodically shreds bits of hashish, marijuana bud and tobacco into three little piles while Sky slurps down his breakfast. Between mouthfuls Sky asks after his siblings.

"They're at Auntie's," says Creek, tearing off flakes of hash between his dirty fingers. "It's just you and me today, bud."

"Okay," says Sky.

Creek glances up to watch him eat, admiring the way the eleven-year-old expertly keeps the spoon pinched in the groove between his plastic fingers, dragging it across the plate to catch the last gooey scraps. Creek sweeps his own shredded piles together with the side of his hand and mixes the powdery concoction in a yellowed glass, then shakes it out into the bilges of three crisp, white rolling papers. He licks the seals and rolls them tight. He looks up again. "Ready to roll, buddy?"

Sky is already wheeling back into the kitchen, the heavy tackle box on his lap.

They fish. The sun sparkles on the water, the water sloshes against the empty jugs holding up the dock. Gull wheel overhead. Creek cracks open another can of beer as he watches his son struggle to attach a lure, patiently repeating the complicated process for a third or fourth time. The can hisses and sprays, so Creek lunges at the beer and sucks away the foam until it calms down. "You almost got it there, eh?" he says, wiping his mouth on his hand. "Just pull that there line taut and you got your knot."

"I'm not sure I tied it right," says Sky.

"You tied it fine. You know how I know? Because it's pretty," says Creek. "An ugly knot'll never hold nothing, but that one's a beaut." He squints out at the water. "Now cast off."

The armless boy performs a remarkably fast twirling flip of his plastic limbs, and a second later the lure is sailing out clear. It drops into the water with a dignified dloop! and bounces back to the surface. Sky reels in a bit, to give it a life-like tug.

Creek nods approvingly. "Right on, bud." He takes a joint from behind his ear and lights it, his own fishing pole lying forgotten across his lap. He exhales a rolling ochre cloud, gives it up to the breeze.

Sky is watching the water. Creek reaches up to tousle his long, black hair then pauses, frowning. "What's this?" he asks, gently feeling out a hard lump on the scalp. "You take a fall?"

Sky jerks his head away. "It's nothing."

"Those assholes at the school were picking on you again, eh?"

Sky shrugs, watching his lure bob. "They said I've got a girl's name." After a moment he adds, "And they said I made Mom leave...that I drove her nuts." He pauses, swallowing. "They said it's because I'm a freak. I tried to hit one of them so they pushed over my chair."

"Them nuns didn't do nothing?"

"They don't ever do anything."

"Mother of Hell," says Creek. He spits, then draws on his joint. "Forget them. Never think about them again. They ain't fit to be part of your world." He exhales another cloud. "You wanna go swimming?"

"I haven't caught any fish yet."

"Screw the fish. It's hot, bud. Let's get wet."

Creek wades through the reeds with his jeans rolled up to his knees. Sky is in his arms, wearing Batman underwear a size too small for him. At the base of his pelvis are two stubby, feckless flippers. The flippers at his shoulders are evident too now that his plastic limbs have been undone. Their straps have left pale, slighly sweaty depressions across the boy's chest.

Creek stands in the shallows and gently lowers the boy into the water so he can float on his back. "It's cold!" squeaks Sky.

"It's refreshing," claims Creek, dragging on his joint. The long ash drops into the water with a hiss. "Ready for me to let go?"

Sky nods. Creek lets his arms fall away from the boy's soft skin. Untethered and unbound, Sky floats. He closes his eyes, his eyelids lit pink from the sun and flashing with caustic reflections from the gentle waves. The water laps in his ears but he doesn't mind.

Creek tosses the end of his smoke, then wrestles a fresh can of beer out of his hip pocket. He cracks it, sips it, gazes out at the hazy blue horizon and allows himself to absorb the warm buzz of a perfect moment. His love for his son makes his chest feel tight and cold, like he's got to cough. He grimaces, turns away, spits and then quietly swears.

"Y'okay?" he mutters.

"Never been better, Dad," says Sky, a peaceful torso bobbing in the sun, a fan of black hair splayed out around his head like a dark halo.

Creek coughs.

On the way home Creek is quiet. He pushes the wheelchair lazily as if he doesn't care if they ever get there. He points out stuff on the side of the road: breeds of tree, a sprout of mushrooms, scat from a deer, an almost invisible toad crouching in the shade of a potato chip bag. His heart isn't really in it, and when Sky asks follow-up questions it seems that Creek can't hear him. "Huh?" he says. "Yeah, yeah. Probably, eh?"

Lucky is waiting for them by the gate. He looks up. "Hey, man. Where you been?"

"Not today," says Creek, shaking his head.

"What?"

"I ain't doing no business today, Lucky. I'm spending the day with my boy."

"I just need a few grams, man."

"It's not a good day for it. Don't make me tell you again, eh? Seriously, Lucky. Take off, okay?"

"You don't have to be an asshole, man."

Creek ignores him, pushing the wheelchair through the gate and then closing it behind them. They bump over the threshold and into the house. Creek grabs the tackle box from Sky's lap and tosses it into a corner with a bang, then goes to the fridge and pulls out another can of beer. It's the last one. "Should we to go the store?" asks Sky, tugging a towel free from the battered sofa on which his father passes out each night.

"Nah," says Creek. "Nevermind that, bud."

Sky hesitates with the towel, looking at Creek with narrowed eyes. "What's going on, Dad?" he asks quietly.

Creeks sits at the kitchen table. He busies himself fussing over a piece of hashish for a moment, flaking bits from an end and gathering them with a pinch of tobacco. "There's some things I wanna tell you," he says, licking a rolling paper and keeping his eyes low.

Sky wheels slightly closer. "...Like what?"

"I ain't the best man in the world, Sky, and you know that," says Creek, lighting the joint. He draws on it, eyes closed. "Everybody knows that," he adds, breathing out slowly. "But even so there's a few things I've learned good. I'm going to tell them to you now, and I want you to listen better than you've ever listened before. Got that?"

Creeks looks up briefly, meets his son's eyes, looks down again. "Got it," whispers Sky.

Creek's eyes are closed again. He isn't drinking his beer but he's clutching the can against his chest. The joint fumes on the table, ribbons of smoke curling up into the shafts of sunlight coming through the dirty kitchen window. "Number one," he says; "look people in the eye." Creek shifts in his seat. "Number two: if somebody asks you a direct question, answer it and tell the truth. Otherwise, talk is mostly useless."

"Dad?"

"And number three," persists Creek; "get yourself a mission in life. Having something to give a shit about keeps you from falling too far off the path." He opens his eyes, and Sky sees with a nervous start that they're brimming with tears. "You are my mission," Creek says, voice quavering. He reaches out and touches the side of Sky's face with his knuckle. "Having to take care of you is the best thing that ever happened to me."

In the distance, police sirens wail.

Sky waits for his father's reaction -- his reflexive anxiety -- but it doesn't come. "I hear cops," says the boy.

"Yeah," agrees Creek with a strange shrug. "I hear them, too."

Sky swallows. "You know who they're coming for?"

Creek nods. "Yeah, bud," he says slowly. "They're coming for me." He turns away and stares out the window, eyes unfocused. "This is our last day together, son. This is it for you and me."

Sky starts to breathe very quickly. "What do you mean? What are you talking about?" He looks around wildly. "We've got to hide you! We've got to get out of here!"

"Nah," says Creek in a distant, numb way. He turns back to Sky and looks him square in the eye again. "There ain't a damn thing we can do about this, Sky. You understand me? It's arranged. It's already happened. You and me? We're just passengers in all this shit. We're fish in a bag. No use us fighting it."

"What do you mean it's arranged? Who arranged it?"

"No point getting into that. Can't change it none. I ain't a fit father, that's been decided, and so they're coming to bust me for dealing. I'm going back to jail."

"What about me?"

"Children's Aid is coming for you. They sent a letter about it. They're going to take you to a Foster home, with probably some real nice people to look after you. They'll probably be white. They'll have a television and everything."

The sirens are closer. Sky's face starts to twitch and then he's crying, his mouth working silently, his face contorted. Creek reaches out and pulls him into a tight, all-enclosing embrace, the boy's head pressed into his bare chest. He wraps his arms around him.

Creek mutters vicious profanity over and over again: such vile words have never been uttered with so much love.

"It's not fair," blubbers Sky.

"That's right," agrees Creek. "It ain't."

"But you're the best dad in the world!"

Creek smells his son's damp hair. He tries to speak, but finds he cannot.

Yellow police cruisers with spinning red lights on top draw up to a squeaking halt in the front garden. Doors slam. Footfalls shuffle on the cluttered walk. An authoritative knocking raps on the metal edge of the screen door. "This is the police!"

Creek gently separates himself from the boy, then chugs the last of his beer. "Stay strong, bud," he whispers, tears running over his high, sharp cheeks. "You just remember never to let nobody tell you what you can't do, okay? You're Sky Mississauga: you can do anything. You keep by that, and you'll manage. You got that? You'll manage whatever comes your way."

A second later Creek is tackled, thrown to the floor, handcuffed, surrounded by shouting police officers. In the middle of it all he looks up at his son and flashes him a smile.

Despite his pain Sky manages to smile back.

He won't speak a word to the people from Children's Aid. They ferry him to a brown sedan and load him into the back seat where a nurse in starched whites takes his blood pressure and listens to his chest with a stethoscope. They shine lights into his eyes and ask him a million questions. They assure him over and over again that everything is going to be "okay."

The boy turns to the social worker squeezed in beside him. "Do you have kids?" he asks suddenly.

She blinks. "Yes, Sky, yes I do. I have a little boy and a little girl at home."

Sky nods. He says, "I hope someone takes them away from you one day." He then turns his head to look out the window, and will say nothing further.

The car pulls away, winds up the dirt road, and leaves the reserve with a rolling cloud of dust in its wake.

It plies the highway, engine humming. They descend into the city. The vehicle doesn't head downtown, however, which is where Sky goes to see his doctor, but instead proceeds along small, curved streets among looming houses with iron gates and rolling green lawns dotted with automated sprinklers. The cars in the driveways are unrusted, and none of them is propped up on cinderblocks. This is a foreign country to Sky: a land of rich white people.

The car pulls up in front of a mansion. Sky is gently carried to his wheelchair, then manoeuvred along a lattice-brick walk surrounded by ornate arrangements of flowers. A make-shift ramp of plywood has been laid over the stairs, and with a grunt of effort the nurse pushes Sky's chair up it and through the front door.

He is wheeled into a den, parked between two leather chairs facing a cold hearth over which hangs a grand portrait in oils of balding, fair-haired man sporting a pompous, checkered ascot. The man is homely, his lips fleshy and his eyes small. Sky can hear adults talking in the next room, and a moment later the nurse and the social worker depart.

A grandfather clock in the corner chimes the hour, its mirthless voice echoing throughout the massive house.

"Hello, Sky."

The boy turns. A plump white man in a grey suit is standing at the threshold to the hall, hands clutched behind his back. He's wearing an ascot, too, like the man in the oil portrait. His white hair is gelled flat, his green eyes bright. Sky says nothing.

The man advances slowly into the room. "I can well imagine what sorts of things you must be feeling right now, and I know it can't be easy. You must understand, however, that certain decisions have been made with your best interest at heart. There are people that care about you, Sky, and I'm one of them."

Sky shifts. "Who are you?"

"My name is Mr. Willoughby, Sky. I'm a friend of your mother's. And, whether you know it or not, I've been looking out for you since before you were born." He stops his advance, now just steps away from the wheelchair, his shadow falling over Sky's lap. "Are you hungry?" he asks.

Sky shakes his head, but Mr. Willoughby isn't convinced.

A trolley is wheeled in by a black lady in a maid's dress. She silently takes a seat on the leather chair closest to Sky and then takes the lids off the dishes, immediately releasing clouds of perfumed steam that cause Sky's mouth to involuntarily water: thin-sliced roast beef, scalloped potatoes, sugared carrots, garlic toast, fried beets, plum-tomato salad and hot gravy. Sky makes a steadfast attempt to seem unconcerned as he licks his lips.

The maid cuts free a ribbon of beef and offers it up to Sky on the end of a silver fork. He eats it.

The maid smiles. Mr. Willougby smiles, too. "A growing boy needs his food," he says with a sigh. His hands are still clutched behind his back, his rotund belly thrust out carelessly. "And you probably can't imagine how gratifying it is to me to finally be able to provide it for you. But it's true. I'm here to take care of you, Sky. If there's one thing you can count on this world, that's it."

Sky chews. He looks to the maid. She has a fork of potato at the ready.

"I am not entirely unfamiliar with your predicament," continues Mr. Willoughby, gaze cast now at the portrait over the hearth. "You don't believe me?" he asks rhetorically, turning halfway toward the boy. "Let me prove it." He brings out his hands, and rolls up the sleeve of his right arm to showcase a plastic artificial limb not entirely unlike Sky's. "I lost my arm in Korea," he explains softly. "In the war. And I know what it's like to be told you can't do something -- that it is firmly beyond your reach. That you're handicapped. An object of pity."

Sky looks at him but says nothing. He swallows, wincing briefly at a bitter aftertaste that follows the potatoes.

"What would you say, Sky," says Mr. Willoughby, "if I told you that there's a better way to live? What if I were to tell you that you are not trapped inside your body -- that you are only trapped by your mind?"

Sky considers this. "What do you mean?" he asks.

Mr. Willoughby shrugs casually, eyes on the portrait again. "Would you care for a drink?"

Sky nods.

The maid reaches for a glass of ice water on the trolley, but Mr. Willoughby holds up a hand to tell her to stop. Instead, he reaches his own hand toward the trolley with an open palm and closes his eyes meditatively. Sky studies his face. He then jumps, startled, as the glass slides across the tray of its own accord and hops right into Mr. Willoughby's waiting hand without spilling a drop. Mr. Willoughby opens his eyes and holds the glass out to Sky. "It can be as easy as that," he promises, eyes wide and fervent.

"How...?"

"You'll learn how, in time," says Mr. Willoughby. "You'll learn to gain full control over the reactive mind, over the body, over matter, over people. Today you are starting down a path that leads to your total personal empowerment, and the awakening of skills you don't even yet suspect you possess."

He tips the glass at Sky's chin, and Sky drinks, eyes riveted on the man.

"I was once a Catholic," says Mr. Willoughby seriously, "but now I see. Now I know not only how, but why. Now I know how the world works. Now I am complete, and so too will you be, young Sky Mississauga."

"Where did you learn this?"

Mr. Willougby turns to the portrait again. "From him," he says. "From the Source. From the greatest prophet to ever walk the Earth. He has been my teacher, and he will be yours, too." He leans closer, his smile beatific. "He is very anxious to make your acquaintance."

"Doctor Ananthan has been helping me..."

Mr. Willougby snorts, straightening again. The maid takes the ice-water glass. He says, "The first thing you will learn is that so-called doctors like Ananthan are charlatans. They're flim-flam artists, nothing more. Psychiatry, psychology, kinesiology: these are fields of pseudo-science, perpetuated by liars and idiots." He frowns. "They are the cause of your alleged handicaps. They keep you weak, docile, and ignorant." He smiles again, his teeth white and neat. "But a human being is so much more than that, Sky. You'll find that out when you learn to tap your true potential."

Sky accepts another mouthful of food, swallows it hastily. "I could learn to do...what you can do?"

"Yes, Sky. That and so much more. A whole new world is opening for you. It's very exciting. It all begins as soon as we get to Florida."

Sky looks up. "Florida?"

"That's where our new facility is, where people like you and I live together to learn from each other, to audit each other through our problems, to help free one another of the shackles of lies we are fed from birth."

Suddenly any hint of excitement is drained from Sky when he considers how far away Florida is from his father. "What if I don't want to go?" he asks.

A woman walks into the den, and she lets her fingers gingerly slide over Sky's shoulder as she comes around his wheelchair. "It's for the best," says Fleuve. "Trust me, baby. This is right."

"Mom?"

She is indeed Sky's mother, though Sky has never seen her looking this way: rosy-cheeked and fresh-faced, eyes glittering, her skin smooth and clear and taut with nourishment and suffused by careless beauty. She's wearing fine clothes and holding herself tall like a lady, her fingers sparkling with rings. She smiles down at him, her brown eyes infinite as she places herself next to Mr. Willoughby and touches his arm tenderly. "Dean only wants what's best for us, Sky. He always has."

Sky doesn't know what to think. His head feels heavy and his ears buzz. "But what about Dad? What's going to happen to him? The police came and took him to jail!"

"We tried to bring him, baby," says Fleuve, "but he wouldn't listen."

Creek told him not to fight fights he cannot win, but Sky can't help himself. He thrashes backward, knocking away the maid's arm and sending a dollop of sugared carrots flying at the wall. "I won't go!" he shouts, crying again. "I'm not leaving Dad behind!"

"I know it's hard, baby --"

"You don't know anything! You don't even know me! You left! You ran away!" Sky pauses, suddenly dizzy. He blinks and shakes his head.

"In hindsight you will see the wisdom of what has gone on here today," contributes Mr. Willoughby blandly, his hands behind his back again. "When the time comes I know you'll come to think of me as a kind of father to you, too. I've always been there for you, Sky."

"No!" screams Sky, eyes pinched shut. "No, no, no! Let me go home! Please? Just let me go home. Mom?"

Fleuve shakes her head. "This is already happening, baby. We're already on our way."

Sky is about to holler back but he pauses, his head swimming. He groans. "I feel weird," he croaks.

"It's just a sedative," explains Mr. Willoughby, "so we can all have a nice, quiet flight down to Clearwater. It's sunny all the time there, did you know that? There's no winter at all. Just palm trees, and beaches, and little lizards that scamper up and down the walls. It's amazing. You'll see. Have you ever met an alligator?"

Sky looks at the hot food still steaming on the plate on the trolley, his tongue still numb from the subtle but bitter aftertaste following each bite. He dashes the plate to the floor with one swipe of his plastic arm. "No!" he bellows, face red; "I don't want to sleep!"

Fleuve's brow crinkles in concern. Mr. Willoughby pulls her closer, whispers in her ear. The maid, with gross indifference, leans down and begins picking up the bits of broken plate.

The last thing Sky remembers is the oil portrait looking down on him, the simulated eyes of some strange prophet seeming to bore into his innermost mind, mocking.

"Dad!" he gasps, then slumps limp into his own lap.

CHAPTER SIX

New Jersey. 1955. Spring.

Elsa's portrait is on the mantel, though her body is in the ground. Albert polishes the glass once a week. He often hums as he does so. He hums Schubert, because Schubert was her favourite.

The house is modest and crammed full of bookshelves. The tables are papered in academia ringed by the imprints of coffee mugs, paperclipped according to topic, yellowed according to age. In the diningroom is a record player and a stack of vinyl discs in cardboard sleeves. Most of them are Mozart, but none of them have been put on to play in a dog's age.

Albert considers the stack. He runs a wrinkled thumb along the golden spines of the Deutsches Grammophon imprint. He giggles, then coughs, then selects a Eugene Istomin rendition of the Andante for a Small Mechanical Organ in F Major.

Tomorrow will be a big day. Like a schoolboy, Albert is enthused. He will address the world via television broadcast.

The music begins, first with anticipatory crackling and then with a fluid burst of ingeniously interleaved melodies, playfully scampering up and down the keyboard, spinning and leaning and keeling in a way that would shock poor Bach. Albert drinks it with his ears, closing his eyes as he settles into his patched easychair. His fingers tap on the armrests and he smiles.

The doorbell rings. His eyes snap open.

With a grunt he heaves himself out of the chair and shuffles across the house to the front door. He peeks through the spyhole, but he can't make out a thing. He wonders where his glasses are, pats the pockets of his sweater, then opens the door.

"Herr Einstein!"

Albert blinks. On the porch before him is a swarthy man with a stark white Van Dyke beard. He's wearing a fine, cream-coloured suit. The lines around his eyes are pronounced as he breaks into a wide smile, splitting his dark face with bright teeth. "I can't believe it," breathes Albert. "Is that really you, Turk?"

"It is very much me," confirms the Turk. "And you will allow me to introduce my protege, Bahram."

Albert nods to the lean, handsome young man standing at the Turk's elbow. He has a moustache like a dash of ink across his smooth upper lip. "How do you do?"

"Very well, sir," says Bahram.

"Won't you come in?"

Prince Siraj and his protege sit on the dusty loveseat across from Albert's paper-strewn coffee table. He rattles in the kitchen, muttering about tea. "It's very rude of me to call you Turkish," he calls. "It's an old habit. Forgive me." He walks in carrying a tottering tray, the cups clinking against one another.

"Let me help you," says Bahram, taking the tray and setting it down. His fingers are long and slender, his nails manicured. Like the prince, he wears several rings emblazoned with inscrutable insignia, some Arabic, some obscure. The rings glint.

Albert turns down the phonograph player and then sinks into the easychair across from his guests. His knees crackle quietly when they fold, which makes him wince. "I'm delighted to see you, of course," he says. "It's been such a long time. What brings you to America, old friend?"

"Why you do, naturally," says the Turk blithely. "I understand you're to make a speech tomorrow, Albert."

"Yes, yes. It's the seventh anniversary of Israel, you understand, which I believe is a perfect occasion to make my announcement."

Bahram and the Turk look at one another. "The new theory?" prompts the Turk.

"Oh yes, yes," nods Albert, gripping the worn arms of his chair. "This time, you understand, I'm going to go about it right from the start. This time, it begins with responsibility! Your father would be proud, I'm sure."

"I'm sure," agrees the Turk.

Albert falters. "He's still with us, your father?"

The Turk smirks. "Oh yes," he confirms. "The Shah is in splendid health."

"I'm glad to hear it," says Albert, then rushes ahead: "You know about my letter to the White House, I'm sure. It was thirty years too late, wasn't it? It was certainly too late for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's a mistake I will not make again. This time, I go ahead with my eyes open."

The Turk pours out three cups of tea. He looks up. "You've really found it, then? A unified theory?"

Albert's eyes gleam. "Yes!" he hisses. "And I was right: God does not play dice. The universe is, ultimately, deterministic." He leans forward in his chair, wags a finger purposefully. "Do you know what an electron truly is, my dear Turk? Shall I tell you?"

"Please."

"It is an idea," he says, raising his chin. "An electron is nothing, old friend, but a little bit of something wound in a particular way. It is a pattern. The medium is inconsequential. Inconsequential. Utterly! Whether one were to be twisting dimensions or twisting yarn, the emergent behaviour is identical." He pauses significantly. "In other words, an electron is a knot."

Bahram tilts his head. The Turk's lined brow furrows as he strokes his white beard. "A knot in what, pray tell, Albert? You're calling it New Kelvinism. Has aether come back into vogue?"

Albert cackles. "That's just the point, Prince -- the medium does not matter. The essence is the message. It is the flow of information with which the universe is both concerned and composed, and the language of that flow is my New Kelvinism. Can you see where this inevitably leads, old friend?" He sits back again, nodding solemnly, his eyes shining. "We are on the cusp of knowing a method for programming the world. It is nothing less than that."

The Turk shakes his head and chuckles. Bahram is expressionless, his hands folded in his lap. "Albert," says the Turk, "I've read your letters to my father. I've tried to follow your proofs. I admit I remain baffled. What I must bear high in mind, though, is what implications there might be to your releasing this theory openly."

Albert sits back, frowning beneath his white moustache.

"You know all too well the consequences of atomics," continues the Turk softly. "Dare we imagine what your next revelation might beget?"

Albert sniffs. "Science is not secret," he says.

The Turk looks into his eyes for a long moment. The clock on the mantel beside Elsa's portrait ticks. Albert shifts. The Turk sighs and then smiles. "I had wondered if your opinion on these matters had changed, but I can see you're as stubborn as always, aren't you?" He laughs. "Your correspondents have contributed to the theory, of course."

Albert blinks. "Of course, yes, yes." He stands up and shuffles over to a wooden writing desk and rolls back the lid. Inside are brown dossiers brimming with trifold-creased papers. The package is marked NEW KELVINISM, LETTERS '53-'55. "There's Roman Klinger in Warsaw who has been instrumental in working through the quantum field proofs, and a young student in Sarajevo, Ratko Zoranovic, whose mind is so limber it absolutely makes me green with envy. I admit it freely." He chuckles. "Oh, to be young."

The Turk laughs and nods. "You should come with me to Anwar. My father can provide you with facilities, funding, minds: anything you need to perfect the work."

Albert stops chuckling. "Provided I keep my research private?"

The Turk nods.

Albert shakes his head. "You know I will not do it."

The Turk shrugs and sips from his cup. "Never the less, I am obliged to ask. Civility first, after all." He glances down at the table. "Your tea is getting cold, Albert."

"Oh, yes," agrees Albert. He drinks.

He pauses, watching Bahram watching him.

The Turk clears his throat. "Is your speech quite prepared?"

Albert considers this, gesturing vaguely. "It's more than begun," he confesses as he takes his seat again, "but not altogether finished, as such. I'll tell you freely that I was procrastinating about it when you came calling." He sips his tea. "It's almost finished, it's almost fair to say."

The Turk laughs again. "You thrive on improvisation, my friend. You always have. Your decisions nip at the heels of your actions, as they did when your hair was black and my spine was straight."

"I'm an idiot," laughs Albert, absently patting down a fluff of wild white hair. "Some things I never learn."

The Turk sighs. A sparrow flits at the window, then flaps away. Albert watches the protege watching it. He finds the young man's gaze seems cold, and it makes him feel uncomfortable. His joints ache.

The Turk rises from the loveseat and strolls across to the writing desk. He picks up the closest dossier of correspondence, then slips out a couple of letters. He scans them and tucks them back. To Bahram he says, "We'll take all of these."

Albert turns. Bahram crosses his legs on the loveseat as he fits a cigarette into the end of a long, ebony holder. He lights it with a silver lighter, his black eyes calmly locked on the old man. Albert opens his mouth but doesn't say anything.

The Turk sighs again. Albert turns back to him. The Turk is looking his age all of a sudden, the skin beneath his eyes swollen and his brow heavy. "It will be nearly painless, naturally," he whispers. "You know my father is very fond of you, Albert."

Albert pales. His forehead glistens.

Bahram shifts on the loveseat, exhales a snake of smoke.

"There is a mild sedative mixed in," explains the Turk, "so when the clot forms you'll be numbed. It will look like a simple aneurism. Try not to worry about it too much. There won't be a fuss."

Albert's breath is becoming shallow. He's dizzy. He sinks lower into his chair, hands slipping from the armrests. The teacup drops from his limp fingers, the last drops sliding out and darkening the carpet. His eyes are wide, his pupils small.

"But you've never really understood the stakes, Albert. It is a source of profound regret for me that things have turned out this way, and for my father that sorrow is double. Still: you always had a choice."

Albert closes his mouth. He loses feeling in his left arm. His vision turns grey.

The Turk straightens, wincing at his back. He clicks his heels smartly, dark lashes brimming with tears. "Auf wiedersehen, Herr von Steissbein."

Albert settles. Bahram is already collecting papers. The Turk checks his watch.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Piroska has a tired arm, but a tireless spirit.

She props the arm up on a book and then, when it chafes, uses her opposite elbow as a lean. When she shifts the resettling of her dress releases blooms of perfumed air, scented jasmine and girl, and its diffusion can be tracked by the subtle sniffs and slight lifts of the head from the other students around her.

(The others are, of course, boys. They smell like rubber erasers and toothpaste, tobacco and coffee, perspiration and stale laundry.)

When the boys put up their hands they're called on immediately. Some of them don't even have to use their hands -- a raised brow will suffice to catch the professor's attention. "Mr. Szabo, you look like you have an answer for us..."

Piroska wags her hand insistently, watching the professor's eyes slide right over her as he picks out another boy in the row behind her for the follow-up. "And if Mr. Szabo were correct in this case, what transform would we be obliged to apply to the tensors at X and Y?"

"We wouldn't be obliged to apply the transformation if --"

An exasperated sigh. "Miss Fodor, please wait until you are called upon. My hall is an orderly place; help me keep it that way."

"But --"

The professor fixes her with an acidic look. All chatter in the lecture hall dies. Everyone is staring at her: three hundred boys, some smirking, some indignant, all against her. Slowly, reluctantly, Piroska lets her arm sag, her face pinched into a paint-peeling scowl.

The lecture continues.

Piroska sits in imitation of stillness for another thirty seconds. She bites the inside of her cheek, whispers a dark oath to herself, and then abruptly stands and begins gathering her things: baby blue pencils topped with white puffs of feather, pens with sparkling ink, binders of scented paper decorated along their mastheads with curlicues of leafy vines, and a furry scientific calculator done up to resemble the face of a kitten. These items are thrust aggressively into her flowered tote bag, zipped and secured over her shoulder, splotches of blush rising to visibility on her pale neck and cheeks.

She leaves beneath a mantle of the lecture hall's studied indifference. The professor rolls his eyes. As the door hisses shut on its hydraulic stop he mutters, "Women!" The boys titter.

Piroska is cut a wide berth through the corridors. Her ruby-red shoes click on the linoleum, the rhythm impatient and uneven. Heads turn in the wake of her perfume. She pushes out through the double doors to the quadrangle, the ancient looming faces of Eotvos Lorand University's towered buildings staring down at this little square of green amid the cobbles and glass and concrete.

(Beyond these walls is the noise and stink and pall of the city -- here, however, there are trees. Here, nothing smells like industrial disinfectant or sweat. Here, being female is no inherent liability.)

The clumps of students are few and far between. She chooses a tree the furthest and the farthest from any of them, then sits beneath it heavily and wonders if she might cry.

It would make her feel stupid, so she wills herself not to.

Instead she withdraws from her tote a hot pink tin case inscribed with images of sparrows hunting worms. Like a sparrow she puts her mouth to the box and withdraws a stiff stick of gum. She huffs, pushes hair out of her face, and settles into a tight, body-hugging pose with her back against the bark. She closes her eyes, chewing.

She jumps when a voice sounds nearby. "You forget this, yes?"

Piroska's eyes snap open. A skinny boy in a rumpled, oversized T-shirt is standing over her. In his outstretched hand he holds Piroska's little bottle of jasmine perfume. She searches his face for signs of mockery, but finds none. Like her, the boy has a beauty mark. His eyes are brown, flecked with green, steady and without pretention. "Thank you," she says, accepting the perfume. She can't quite bring herself to smile, so she redoubles her gum chewing efforts instead.

"You run away so fast," the boy continues. "It's hard to catch you. Can I sit down? I'm losing my breath."

Piroska humps her wide bum aside, making room by the roots. "My name is Piroska Fodor," she says.

"I'm Drago," says Drago.

"I know."

Drago picks a spot on the grass, settles in cross-legged. He looks at his feet. His shoes are covered in dense webs of chess notation. "How do you know me?" he asks.

"Everyone knows you," says Piroska, blowing and then recapturing a translucent pink bubble. "You're the Mad Serb."

Drago looks up. He isn't offended. He smiles. It's a charming, child-like smile. "Why are you never called on to answer questions, Piroska?"

"Because I'm a girl, Drago," she says, eyes narrowed. "Girls don't make good maths majors. Or didn't you know?"

"How can that be true?"

"It isn't," she says with forced carelessness. "But that's what the dean thinks. He told me as much when I was accepted. 'It'll be a trial by fire for you, miss, if you insist on going through with this questionable course of study.'"

Drago laughs, because Piroska's imitation of the dean's stuffy, gravelly tone is spot on. "I don't mean to laugh. That's absurd. Why should the dean want to discourage us?"

Piroska pauses in her gum chewing, watching Drago oddly. She purses her lips, and there is a hint of a smile at the corners. "I like that," she says finally.

"You like what?"

"I like that you're the first person at this school to ever discuss the idea of my earning my degree in maths while using the term us, as if I were no different than you."

"Well...you aren't, really, are you?"

She pulls out her gum and squashes it against the tree. "When I first came here, nearly three years ago, I knew they didn't think girls belonged. I tried to hide myself. I tried to dress like a boy, to talk like a boy, to fade into the background of boys." She looks up at Drago. "But it didn't work."

"Why not?"

She shrugs, then looks down at her own ample body stuffed inside a floral-print summer dress. "I'm too fat to hide my bosoms, Drago. No matter what I tried, they still thought of me as a female first and a student second."

"I don't mean to stare at them," confesses Drago, colouring.

"They're there. It can't be helped," says Piroska. She sits up straighter and shrugs again. "So I decided there was no point in denying who I am. I gave up any disguise. I decided to be every inch the girl, and to hell with them all. It's the maths I'm here for, and the maths are the fairest judges there can be: all they care about is whether you're correct." She smiles. "And, when it comes to maths, I am always correct."

Drago smiles back. "They hate me too, at school. You know this. But numbers do not hate anyone."

Piroska pauses again, considering something. She twists a loose lock of strawberry-blonde hair in her stubby fingers. "Drago, would you like to come to lunch with me? Being upset makes me hungry."

Drago hesitates. "This is...this is like a date?"

Piroska shrugs. "I don't know. I'm not an expert. I'm too ugly and too clever to have much experience in the field."

"I think you're very pretty," offers Drago.

"Well, that decides it," she announces, standing up and slinging her tote bag over her shoulder. Her cheeks dimple. "It's definitely a date."

At Karma Cafe they sit on a patio overlooking the smoky city, the air above the haze a bold azure stroke peppered with cotton-wads of drifting cumulus. Between them: traffic helicopters, small planes, whorls of birds oriented like spills of iron-filings across the sky. Down below the Danube glimmers. The waiter brings two steaming coffees and a plate of Viennese pastries.

"So are the stories they tell about you really true, Drago?"

Drago considers this, stirring his coffee. "What do they say about me?"

"They say when you can't find paper you carve your notes into the walls."

"Well, that's true."

She blushes. "And they say you get...aroused when you're doing maths."

Drago blushes, too. "I can't help it. Numbers are exciting."

"And you've really changed residences over a dozen times?"

"That's not strictly true, actually," he counters. "Sometimes they just change my roommate, but not the room itself."

"Do you have trouble getting along with people?"

"No, I am happy to meet everyone," he claims. "But often they find me trying, and they complain. Blah-blah-blah, the Mad Serb wrote on my pillow, blah-blah-blah, the Mad Serb won't put on pants. It's always the same. I try to accommodate them, but my efforts come up short in their estimation."

"I know that feeling," says Piroska darkly. She pulls the wad of gum out of her mouth, sips her coffee, then puts the gum back in.

"Why do you always chew the gum?" asks Drago.

"It stops me from eating," she says, holding the gum aside again as she selects a mini apple strudel from the plate and devours it.

"Ah."

"They say you're a prodigy," continues Piroska, swallowing away the strudel and licking icing sugar from her lips. "That's why the school tolerates your...eccentricity. They say you're a natural. They say you'll one day do great things."

"My grades are not good," confesses Drago sadly. "I struggle, yes, like everyone."

Piroska shrugs, chin in her hand. "I don't struggle."

"Maybe it's you who is the prodigy, then. I don't claim anything for myself. I am just Drago."

She smiles. "Alright, Just Drago. Now I know I have a lesson for you. Piroska has something for everyone. I too might once have said I am 'just Piroska' but those days are gone. I will never be just anything again. And, when I am done teaching you, you will also refuse to belittle yourself."

"Is it belittling to say I simply am who I am?"

"It is if it's a matter of just or merely or simply. Take me, for instance. I will never consent to be 'simply Piroska.' I am Piroska! Do you hear the difference? One is a concession, the other a declaration -- a challenge to the world."

"You are Piroska!" echoes Drago, grinning throug his coffee steam.

"Yes!" she cheers. "I am. And you -- well, you know I only know you by reputation and the look in your eyes right now across this table, but even so I would wager any amount that you are Drago! See? Try it with me."

"I am Drago!"

"That's a reasonable start. I can see in the skin around your eyes how you don't believe it. Even so, given time you will certainly improve." She pops another pastry into her mouth as she holds the wad of gum aloft. "You've begun your paper for Dr. Lupescu?"

"Yes..." says Drago guardedly.

"How is it?"

"It's terrible."

"Then I shall be your tutor. If you are a prodigy, I'll find out why your work doesn't show it."

"And if I'm not?"

"And if you're not, I will learn the secret of the misapprehension. If being seen as a prodigy is a reproducible error, I want to learn it because no matter how consistently correct I am I cannot manage to impress upon our professors the fluidity of my facility. If your genius is a lie, Drago, I wish to know how to tell it for myself."

Drago smiles. "Because you are Piroska?"

"I am Piroska!"

"I am Drago!"

"That's somewhat better. See? You're coming along already." She spits her gum over the edge of the railing, then perfumes herself and snaps closed her tote. "I need to see your notes. Let's go to your dormitory."

"Is this still part of the date?"

"If we walk arm in arm it is, yes."

Arm in arm they scuttle up the dormitory steps and then pad down the corridor to Drago's door. Drago's current roommate has changed the locks again, so Drago is obliged to pick it. Taped to the door is a pink carbon-copy of a notice of a formal complaint launched against Drago, commanding him to appear before the dean at 18:45. Piroska reads it aloud as Drago saws a carefully bent paperclip back and forth through the keyhole, cocking his head as he listens to the clicking tumblers.

The latch springs. Drago pushes open the door and walks inside, ignoring the notice. It flutters in the breeze as he swings the door shut behind Piroska.

She slows, brow furrowing. She is suddenly considerably less certain of her course of action, clearly aware that the Mad Serb is essentially a stranger to her. She draws her tote protectively close.

Drago's side of the room looks like it's been exploded. Everywhere is crumpled clothing, torn papers, discarded pens, broken pencils, tissues and towels, crusts of hardened food, half-empty cups filled with liquids long turned foul beneath a bobbing head of mold, rulers and binders coated from edge to edge in scratched chess notation, single shoes, single socks, a bewildering array of knives and chisels...

This is down below. Up above, around the bed, on all sides of the window, there are photographs of a raven-haired girl thrusting out her artfully tapered breasts or coyly spreading her labia. Everywhere Piroska looks there is another image of the girl staring back at her, eyelids heavy, licking her lips, tracing a finger along the contours of her own nudity. Her stomach is flat and taut, like a fashion model; her anus is pink and soft-looking, like a child's.

Piroska's mouth goes dry. "So..." she says in a small voice, "you're a big fan of pornography, I see."

"Pornography?" says Drago, shaking his head. "No, no. Not at all. You don't understand: this is my sister."

Piroska coughs. "What?"

"She's a model, yes," he claims. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"Um," says Piroska, eyes involuntarily lingering on a photo involving a frighteningly bestudded dildo cast in garish green plastic. She blinks and turns her back to the display. She bites the inside of her cheek and looks at the floor.

"Does it make you feel funny?" asks Drago.

"A little," admits Piroska.

"I should not have brought you here."

Piroska turns to face him again as he sits on his unmade bed. "Don't say that, Drago. You allowed me to come because you trusted me not to judge you. It's me that's being foolish. Forgive me." She takes a breath, scans the papered walls again. "You love your sister."

"Yes," whispers Drago. He's looking past her, eyes unfocused. "Very much."

"Then that's all that matters," decides Piroska. "Does she live here in Budapest?"

"She doesn't live anywhere, really."

"Because she travels for her work?"

Drago looks up, his face slack. "No, Piroska. Because she has died."

"Oh, God," says Piroska, blinking again. "I'm so sorry, Drago."

"Don't be sorry," he replies cryptically. "She's not altogether gone."

This statement flummoxes poor Piroska but she affords herself no time to dwell on it: her habitual reaction to confusion is to take charge. She stands up taller and puts her hands on her broad hips. "Show me your notes for Dr. Lupescu, Drago."

Drago nods, then reaches to three corners of the bed and retrieves balled wads of papers from each. He smooths them out on the yellowed sheet, squinting to read his own scrawls. Piroska walks over and kneels by the bed, taking the papers from Drago. She frowns, looks up. "This is...a chess game?"

He shakes his head. "Not directly, no, no. The chess-like manifold models the topology --"

"Well, clearly."

Drago pauses, blinking. "Okay, yes. So you can see: the two-bishop here, he is defining the subspaces while the five-king, this one, when he's in check puts the stationary points into relief, yes? This knight array moves along the higher-order mappings between the non-intersecting subspaces here and here. My queen..." He hesitates, fingers hovering over the notes reverentially. "My queen she defines the realm of solutions, and her trajectory along the hypersurface squares reveals the corresponding functions."

"But, why..."

"Look again. The extrusions fall away up-left and inverse-right. We can abelianize the topological space of checkmates, and also connect each one with a unique higher-dimensional board structure, and nothing changes when you unfold it. It's much easier to calculate that way, and the products are still valid. Do you follow?"

She sniffs around a half-smile. "Of course I follow," she says. "I am Piroska!"

Drago nods, handing her the next sheet. She pores over it, lips twitching slightly. She looks up again. "Drago," she says slowly, "you are a genius. That much is apparent. But," she adds with a frown, "you're also an idiot."

"It's been suggested before, yes," he admits. "I will fail."

She shakes her head. "You're an idiot because you're being asked to deconstruct Hellenic ballads and you're doing so using Japanese haiku. Is it any wonder Lupescu can't follow?"

"My method is succinct and pliable, yes. I am fluid, like this."

"Your method might as well be in Basque. You would be better off handing in your papers as Morse Code dots and dashes...or, at least, no worse off. Either way your arguments are lost, essentially meaningless to anyone but you, Drago."

"The information is there. It can all be reduced to first principles. Surely Lupescu's brain is nimble enough to make the leap into more crude notation if he feels that's desirable, no?"

"No!" cries Piroska. "That's why you're an idiot, Drago. You ask too much of him. He can't be bothered to translate your paper in order to read it."

"My calculus is superior."

"Maybe so, but it's personal. Mathematics is the only truly universal mode of communication, Drago. You've managed to get by in Hungarian -- can't you concede to also learn a standard way of manipulating numbers so that you might be understood?"

"My Hungarian is awful."

"I can follow you well enough. It gets the job done, doesn't it?"

"People make funs of my accent."

"So? Since when are people a reasonable measure of civility? It's how people don't behave that we consider laudable -- the default is barbarism, tribalism, nationalism, creedism. The default behaviour is to separate. Maths, on the other hand, bring us together. With maths we can discard accents and idioms, and agree upon what is correct. If you can't communicate that to someone else, you might as well never open your mouth. You might as well live exclusively inside your own brain."

Drago opens his mouth, says nothing, then closes it again. He nods.

Piroska puts his papers aside, then cracks her knuckles. "Are you ready to learn, Drago? I am confident that together we can build a bridge that will allow you to work with your notations but to output something meaningful to the faculty. Will you try?"

Drago nods again. "Yes. Help me, Piroska. I will try strongly, yes."

"In exchange, you are obliged to take me on another date. Perhaps to a concert?"

He nods again, eyes flitting. "Yes, yes. Now you will show me how to stop being an idiot in this way?"

"I will," she says. "Let's begin with an example problem. I want to see how you work it through."

"Okay..."

Piroska opens her tote and withdraws a sheet of scented paper and a feather-tipped baby blue pencil. She takes them over to his roommate's pristine desk and jots down a few lines, then hands the paper over. Drago scans it quickly. "This is a child's problem," he says.

"It is," she agrees. "Show me how you solve it."

He does so. She nods over the paper again, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Interesting..." she declares after a moment. She flips the page and writes down a more complex problem. "Now this. It shouldn't take you long. I've already solved it in my head."

Drago reads the problem. "So fast?"

"I am Piroska!"

Drago takes the pencil, scratches his head with it as he thinks. In another moment he jots down the solution. Piroska hands it right back to him. "And now the proofs, please."

"But it's obvious!"

"Just do it, Drago. Take it back to axioms. Omit nothing."

He snatches back the paper, frowning at it as he paces the room, his lanky form bobbing. His tongue moves inside his mouth, his gaze roams. A film of sweat breaks out across his brow, but he catches it before it runs into his eyes. In a flash he's jumped on the bed and he studies a scrawl of rudely-etched figures carved into the plaster, fingers running over the edges and causing little cascades of dust to trickle down onto his pillow. He drops from the bed again, shaking his head. "I can't do it -- it's simply too tedious and it obfuscates everything I'm trying to say..."

Piroska just looks at him.

Drago sighs. He wipes his brow again, sitting on the floor cross-legged and rubbing at his neck. He focuses in. He clutches the pencil, chews it, stabs at the air with it, and then finally begins jotting hurried lines of scratchy, barely legible notes across the page. She hovers nearby, only once or twice pointing out an easy translation from his system to the conventional one. Drago begins to nod. "Okay, okay, okay..." he mutters. "Yes, I can see it now..."

He catches himself as he unconsciously begins to peel the loose T-shirt off his sweaty back. He pauses, looking at Piroska.

"Go ahead. I know your reputation."

"My clothes bind me," he explains lamely.

"Take them off. I don't mind."

"But, you are a girl..."

"So now suddenly the shameless Mad Serb develops shame?"

Drago gives her a hard but lost look.

"Very well," says Piroska. "I will join you. Will that make you feel less vulnerable?"

"No," he decides quietly. "But it might make me feel less alien."

Piroska unbuttons her dress and lets it drop, releasing a cloud of perfume. Her alabaster body is squeezed into a matching set of pink brassiere and underwear. Across the front of the underwear is the cursive word WEDNESDAY. She has beauty marks that are not usually apparent. Drago finds himself involuntarily transfixed as she unsnaps the bra and then bends double to kick off her Wednesdays. She straightens, her cheeks colouring, twisting a strand of hair by her ear that's dropped loose from her elaborate braids.

"Okay?" she says.

"Hufph," says Drago, his jaw slack.

She snaps her fingers. "Drago! The maths!"

"Oh yes!" he cries, and then seizes the paper and pencil once more, his eyes flashing with a new and profound hunger. He scribbles furiously. She watches over his shoulder, feeling out blindly behind for her tote in order to secure a fresh stick of gum.

She grimaces suddenly. "Now why would you do that? You're going to end up with all sorts of messy infinities."

"The infinities go away. Look now."

"That operation makes no sense!"

"It does, it does. You just have to use actual numbers."

"Actual numbers? Do you mean real numbers?"

"No, no: actual numbers, yes. Not the dumb symbols people push around -- I mean the numbers nature uses when she counts. Look: like so, like so, like so. Presto: the disjointed becomes contiguous, the infinities are vanished."

Piroska's eyes widen. "Show me that again."

He does so. Again she points out the nodes of consanguinity with conventional algebraic algorithms, piece by piece bridging the gap between the Mad Serb's insanely complicated system of calculation and the way the rest of the academic world counts. She reels as she tries to digest his processes, now beginning to catch glimpses of the titanic iceberg of idiosyncratic but deeply insightful calculus hulking beneath the bizarre glimmers of multidimensional chess shown on the page. "It's...beautiful," she gasps.

He looks up, one brow cocked. "Yes," he agrees breathlessly. "That's how I know it is true."

"This is deep. I can't believe you try to use it day to day. It's like putting in a nail with a wrecking ball."

He sniffs, sweat dripping from his nose. "I don't go in for half measures, Piroska," he says, then smirks. "I am Drago!"

"Indeed," she nods seriously, eyes locked on his. "You certainly are." She looks down at the densely-scribbled page again. "Now, bring it all home, Drago. Make it something even Lupescu could read."

"I'm not sure that I can..."

"You must. The burden is on you. Do you want to live alone inside your mind, or do you want the world to count with you?"

"I'm not all alone there --"

"Drago! Translate!"

This imperative is high-pitched and sure, like his mother's commandments to put his head between his knees or flee. Drago reacts automatically, his hand flying across the page as he scrunches up his face painfully. He stands to begin pacing anxiously again. "But here I will lose information --"

"No!" she shouts, grabbing his shoulders and arresting him in place. "Merge tables L1 and L2. Watch what happens. You'll see the symmetry."

"But --"

"Do it!"

He mashes the page between her pendulous breasts and she feels his jotting pencil tickle across her sternum: probing, wandering, scratching out and starting again. Suddenly he looks up, his brow open, his mouth loose. "Yes," he whispers, "yes, yes I see it now!" and then lays into another ferocious bout of scribbling. The paper tears. The pencil digs into Piroska's skin but she doesn't flinch.

He stops. The pencil wavers. "I'm hurting you."

"Finish!"

"But if I --"

"Finish!" she commands, reaching out and grabbing him by his most prominent and intimate appendage.

Drago is erect. His eyes pop open wider. His face colours. He writes, then drops the pencil, breathing hard.

They stare at each other, glistening faces just inches apart.

Piroska peels the torn paper from her chest and reads his last figures, then nods curtly and smiles, her cheeks dimpling. "You've done it, Drago. Welcome to a wider world."

His expression changes, eyelids fluttering. She feels a warm splash on her belly as he ejaculates.

It is at this exact moment that Drago's roommate, Sandor, opens the door and his boisterous conversation with his friends cuts off mid-sentence. Sandor's gaze is unwillingly riveted by the image of the skinny, sweaty, naked Serb standing in the middle of the room with a pencil between his feet.

"Oh my God!" cries Sandor.

His friend swings open the door the rest of the way, revealing Piroska's ample nudity as she continues to clutch Drago's rapidly softening, dripping member in her chubby hand.

"Oh my God!" cries Sandor again. "My eyes!"

Piroska turns to face him with her hands on her hips, her round stomach thrust out carelessly like a child. "What?" she says lightly. "Haven't you ever seen someone doing their homework before?"

"I'm sorry, Sandor," stammers Drago. "We were simply --"

Sandor is looking at the wall as his friends dodge their heads sideways to see past him, flinching dramatically when they do. "This," yells Sandor at the wall, "this is why I lodged my complaint with the dean! God! What is wrong with you people?"

"The dean?" blinks Piroska. She checks her watch. The tips of the hands are little crimson hearts. "Drago, your appointment! It's nearly quarter to seven!"

"What?" says Drago, eyes narrowed in bewilderment.

"The dean! You have to see the dean!"

"Yes," adds Sandor darkly. "So he can expel you, freak."

Sandor's expression changes from derision to fright when he finds himself backed into the corner behind the door as Piroska surges at him. She jumps at him aggressively, her large breasts pinning him against the wall, her face drawn in so close he can smell her gum. "Listen, asshole," she hisses, "if you've got a problem with him, you've got a problem with me. Got that? And I promise you right now I can break you over my knee like a toothpick if you force me to."

Sandor's face says he believes her. His mouth moves but he makes no words.

"Now get the hell out of here," she adds.

Sandor squirms out along the door and then hurriedly disappears into the hall, his friends following after casting uncertain glances back at the two naked mathematics students. Piroska slams the door and then spins to face Drago again. "Get dressed," she advises.

"That was amazing!" he says, stumbling into a pair of jogging pants.

She raises her chin haughtily. "And are you surprised?" she asks, brow arched. "I am Piroska!"

Drago grins. "And thank goodness for it."

She checks her watch again. "You're late! Go, go, go!" She throws a T-shirt at him and scoops up her tote, quickly jotting something on a small square of pink paper then jamming it into his pocket. "This is my address. You'll come calling when you're done?"

"I will," he swears earnestly, still grinning.

He runs across the quadrangle, dodging other students and calling apologies over his shoulder. He takes the steps of the administration building three at a time and then nearly wipes out on the recently polished linoleum in the lobby. People stop to stare in anticipation of the crash but he recovers, shoes squeaking, and then inexplicably knocks his heels together as he jumps into the elevator. The doors rumble shut lazily while he stabs at the buttons.

"I was quite prepared to send you packing today, Mr. Zoran," growls the dean from the far side of his immaculate desk. "But it seems someone else has already relieved me of that pleasure."

"Sir?" prompts Drago, wiping perspiration from his face with his T-shirt.

The dean folds his hands on the blotter. "Against all reason, your application to the Sorbonne has been accepted."

"But, sir, I do not have the means..."

The dean pushes a letter to the edge of his desk. The masthead carries an elaborate seal circumscribed with wiggly Arabic worm-letters. "You have been awarded the Anwar Scholarship, Mr. Zoran," he pronounces carefully. "It is a very generous scholarship: accommodation, tuition and travel."

Drago is speechless. He clutches the damp front of his T-shirt, mouth agog.

"You don't seem pleased," says the dean. He smiles smugly. "Goodness knows I am."

Drago takes a deep breath, slinking slightly lower in his chair. "I shall have to cancel my date," he concludes sadly.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Yves cranks down the window. It's windy, but between the gusts he can hear a thousand kinds of frog clicking and croaking and beeping at the moon. The air is warm and thick, the night suffused with an extra glow by a heavy soup of spring humidity.

His eighteen-wheeler tears through the fog banks, sending them sloshing away into ghostly, symmetrical twists on either side of the wake trail. The engine keens.

A line of palm trees flashes by in his headlights.

He glances at the map pinned to his visor, checks the rolling digits on the tripmeter, then shifts down to ninth gear in anticipation of the curve ahead. The carriage bucks a bit. "Come on now," urges Yves, wagging the clutch. He drops into eighth.

The freeway bends. The moon holds still. Yves eases the rig around, hand over hand on the wheel, coaxing the next stretch of the immediate future into view. He starts to whistle a Johnny Cash tune.

And then there's a guy stumbling into the middle of the road.

Yves yanks on the engine brake, shifts and spins the wheel wildly to and then fro, describing an imaginary safe trajectory he can only hope the cab and trailer will follow as the physics of the moment catch up to them. In the blink of an eye before they do he watches the strange, skinny figure collapse across the dotted line, his body plied from the fog by the moving headlights, haloed by a shifting host of shadowed rays.

The truck dodges the body, the tires at the back of the trailer skittering and squealing. Yves plunges the brakes and brings the rig to a shuddering but controlled halt on the shoulder in a hail of flying gravel. The door flies open and he hits the ground running, pelting across the asphalt to the guy lying in the lanes.

He's already stirring.

"Jesus God I thought I hit you!" shouts Yves. "Are you okay? Fella?"

The guy is breathing hard. "You ran over my leg," he gasps.

"Jesus!" yells Yves, kneeling down. He glances nervously back at the bend. "We have to get you off the road!" Without waiting for a reply he scoops the frail form over his shoulder and starts loping toward the gravel, speeding up as a sweep of headlights play around the corner.

He stumbles as two cars blast past, their wind pushing at his back. He drops to his knees beside the guardrail, lit red by the lights on the back of his truck, and gently lowers his charge to the ground. He's wearing a mud-splattered white shirt and a twisted blue tie. He's a teenager -- maybe sixteen or seventeen -- and he doesn't struggle against the pain.

Yves takes a bracing breath. "Can you feel your leg at all, son?"

"No. It's artificial."

Yves is startled. He frowns. "It's a what?"

"It's fake," pants the youth, still working to find his wind. "Thank you for your help. I can manage myself from here."

Yves takes out a handkercheif and wipes his brow. "I can't rightly just leave you like this, kid. Are you crazy?"

"No," he replies evenly, rocking his torso back and forth oddly and then using the momentum to hoist himself into sitting position. In the red lights of the truck his nose carves a blade-like shadow across his sharp cheeks. "You should leave now. You're in danger."

Yves frowns. "What are you talking about? From what?"

Dogs bark. From within the mangroves on the other side of the freeway flashlight beams glimmer, growing closer. "From them," says the youth.

"Cops?"

The youth shakes his head. "There's no reason to involve yourself."

"Like hell there isn't," grunts Yves. "You think I'm going to run over a crippled guy and then leave him to the dogs? What kind of a Christian would I be there, huh?"

The youth raises his gaze to look Yves in the eyes, but says nothing.

They make for the cab. Yves offers the guy help getting in, but he doesn't want it. He uses his broken artificial leg as a crutch, hopping along after it, his other leg equally stiff and bony beneath torn blue trousers. He jacks himself up onto the sideboard in a discomfiting, almost insectile way that suggests to Yves that an amputated leg is the least of this guy's challenges. He shakes his head and jogs around the rumbling grille to take his mount.

The eighteen-wheeler noses back onto the freeway, Yves clutching and shifting in a thoughtless, automatic way. He peeks in the mirrors, watching as a group of shadowed figures step into the fog still glowing in the truck's departing lights. A brace of dogs slink and sniff at their heels. One of the figures points at Yves' truck.

Yves blinks. "Who are they, kid?"

"It's the Org. I'm running away."

"What the hell's the Org?"

The youth turns to look at him in the darkened cab. "They kidnapped me five years ago, when I was eleven, and have been holding me against my will ever since," he says seriously. "They're organized, funded, and ruthless. They'll never stop looking for me."

"Jesus Christ," says Yves, glancing in the mirror again. All he can see is fog. "It's like a cult, something like that?"

"Something like that," agrees the youth with a barely perceptible nod, turning to face forward again.

"Did they...did they do this to you?" asks Yves, mouth suddenly dry. "Did they take your leg, to sacrifice to Satan or something?"

"No," the youth says to the windshield. "I was born like this. Do you know what thalidomide is?"

Yves chews his lip, squinting. "Is it that Nazi drug that made all them flipper-babies?"

The youth raises his left arm, then tugs back the sleeve. The arm is artificial. Unlike the leg, which is a naked skeleton of metal, the arm is smooth and pink and plastic. He then showcases the right arm, and it is the same. The youth's hands are claws, shaped almost whimsically, perhaps cruelly, like real anatomy. There are even sculpted crease lines on the immobile, lifeless knuckles.

"God damn," says Yves. He wipes his hand down his face, shifts into seventh. "The name's Yves. Yves LeRoche. Most guys call me Frenchy."

The youth introduces himself in turn with a polite bow of the head. "Mississauga."

"You an Indian, Mississauga?"

"Yes."

"That's all right by me. I ain't no bigot. I even give coloured guys rides. Shit, I don't care."

Mississauga says nothing. Yves changes lanes to pass an overloaded Winnebago clunking along by the shoulder, hazards flashing. He watches it shrink in the side mirror, then notices the Indian youth staring at his own mirror. "I think they're okay," offers Yves.

"I'm not watching the Winnebago."

Yves gets a flash of gooseflesh across his shoulders. "What are you looking at, son?" he ventures.

Mississauga turns to him, brow sloped forlornly. For a moment the kid looks genuinely worried. (For a moment, he looks nearly human.) "It's the Org," he breathes.

Three sets of headlights have appeared behind them, swinging around the furthest bend and quickly closing the distance to the eighteen-wheeler. Their lights carve shafts in the fog, pointing ahead of them like groping fingers.

"Damn," says Yves. "God damn. They're persistent buggers, you say?"

"You can't imagine," says Mississauga.

"What are they gonna do if they catch you? They gonna hurt you?" Yves turns to the kid, frowning. "They gonna kill you?"

Mississauga shakes his head. "Worse," he says. "They'll force me to go back."

"God damn," says Yves again. His eyes flick to the mirror. He shifts into tenth.

"Drop me off at next place you can safely stop, Mr. LeRoche," advises Mississauga calmly. "These are dangerous people. You owe me nothing. Keep your life simple, and walk away from this now."

Yves swallows, eyes on the road. His hands tighten on the wheel. "I don't think I can rightly do that, son."

Mississauga offers him a small, tight smile. When he speaks again it is in a new voice, crisp and imperative: "In that case, Mr. LeRoche, you must evade those cars. You must do so immediately. If we lose them now, I have a chance. If they force us over, it's finished."

Both of their faces are illuminated by the reflected glare of the swarm of headlights arranged behind them, now just feet from the trailer's edge. The kid's eyes are wide as they pierce into the trucker, the whites seeming to glow around the dark pupils, and there's something unsettling in that look that compels Yves to action.

Yves glances in the mirror again, then takes a breath. He turns back to the hard-faced youth. "Don't worry, kid," he says, patting the dashboard. "This baby packs a wallop. Besides, I know a few manoeuvres."

Yves double-clutches, gears down and hits the hammer. The truck lurches forward, pressing them into their seats. The engine bellows, stacks blasting. The Org cars lag temporarily behind.

Yves toggles a switch on the citizen band receiver and then draws out the microphone on a coiled tether, clicking the contact with his thumb. "Breaker, Breaker: one-nine. This is Frenchy -- I'm eastbound on fifty-four, and I got trouble. Thirty-three, thirty-three. Come back?"

The radio squelches. A voice comes through, gruff and tired: "This is Jake's Bacon on ya, five miles up river. Kick it, Frenchy."

"I got bad apples up my tandems, Jake's Bacon. Need some help shaking 'em loose, over."

Another voice cuts in. "Aceline on one-nine. I'm tailing Jake's Bacon up here. What's the fuss, driver?"

"I'm carrying a boy -- he was kidnapped by some kind of cult, but he escaped. They're chasing us down, trying to take him back." Yves checks the mirror, eyes widening as the pursuing headlights swell in his view. "Ruthless sons of it, too. Not giving up easy, over."

"That ain't right," says Jake's Bacon. "The Jehovahs did a number on my first wife. Frenchy, hang tight. We're gonna set up a lock up where the slab goes wide, a mile off the parkway exchange. Copy that?"

"I hear ya. We're real grateful back here, good buddy."

"Nobody messes with a kid on my road," adds Aceline. "I see you, Bacon. Can we scare up a third? Over."

Another burst of static. "One-niner, one-niner: this is Missus Thor on fifty-four east out of Odessa. I'll join your line, boys. What's your twenty, Jake? Over."

Mississauga turns his attention to the front as they coast down a shallow hill and hit a long stretch of level where the freeway splits from two lanes to three. There are orange sodium lamps between the palms causing series of gliding, overlapping shadows to peel off the three eighteen-wheelers up ahead: a rolling wall of steel tearing a tunnel in the fog.

Yves blasts his horn. The trucks up ahead blast back. It's like whalesong.

"I see you back there, Frenchy. We're opening the lock."

Yves clicks his mic. "Ten-four." He hangs it up, eyes on the mirror, then spares the Indian a quick look. "Put your seatbelt on," he advises.

Three white, windowless vans zoom up alongside the truck. In concert they begin to veer over, leaning into the truck's lane and toward the breakdown strip. "Buggers!" hisses Yves, reaching for the gearshift.

The engine roars furiously, the cab quakes. He sways the rig over, just enough to put some fear into the white vans. Instinctively they draw back from the huge, spinning wheels.

More blasts of whalesong sound, stretched on the wind.

The rolling wall of steel ahead has slid apart. Yves' truck plunges into the gap, switching lanes one way and then the other, the swaying trailer groaning in metallic complaint. The other trucks flash by, trailer lights smeared into lines, their engines' voices Dopplered high and then low by speed.

And then, suddenly, the wall of rolling steel is intact behind them again. The lock has closed, a truck in each lane, riding perfectly abreast. Their engine brakes sputter as they crank down the speed in unison, widening the gap between Yves and Mississauga up ahead and the Org vans trapped behind.

"Yee-HOO!" croons Yves. He grabs the CB. "We're owing you large up here, good buddies. That was beautiful!"

He looks over at Mississauga, startled to see the youth's face pulled into a novel shape: he's grinning. His teeth shine gold in the sodium light.

Yves laughs. "What do ya think of that, kid? Not too shabby, huh?"

"Indeed, Mr. LeRoche. Not shabby at all." He pauses, then his face hardens. "Now what?"

"Now we take the parkway south, pick another route north to mix it up a bit. Keep them guessing." He starts moving over toward the entrance ramp for the southbound interchange. "I'm going to Jersey with an empty load. I can afford to be a little late. Jed and I go way back." Yves shifts gears as the truck slows for the cloverleaf, rounding the bend onto the comparatively busier Interstate 75. Tourist buses cram the outside lane.

The eastern horizon is turning rosy. The night is almost over.

Yves inserts the rig into the flow of traffic effortlessly, his gaze tracking out the window across the overpass to watch their rolling wall of steel and the captive vans approaching the interchange. Yves and Mississauga can't be spotted: up here his unmarked semi is just one of many.

Up ahead, Miami's glow is colouring the bellies of a bank of clouds. Yves notes the Org vans winding up the northbound cloverleaf, drawing further and further behind them. He chuckles, then pulls a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, knocking one free as he presses the pack to his mouth.

"Damn," he says again, lighting it up. He holds the pack out across the cab. "Help yourself, son," he says.

Mississauga looks at the pack. "The Org forbids pollution of the body."

Yves shrugs. "Sure. So does my wife, but I still give it to her now and again anyways. Ha, ha."

Mississauga reaches out and wedges a cigarette between the plastic thumb and forefinger of his artificial hand, then sticks it between his lips. He leans over so Yves can light it. The youth drags experimentally, coughs slightly, then blows twin streams of smoke from his hatchet-shaped nose. "It's warm," he notes.

"Yeah," agrees Yves. "So, where ya fixing to end up, kid? Where is it you're going to?"

The youth drags meditatively and then exhales another pair of fume streams through his nostrils. "Canada," he says.

Yves adjusts his cap, nodding. "You figure it'll be safe from these Orgasm guys up there, huh?"

"No," says Mississauga. "I'm going to find my father."

CHAPTER NINE

A long grey limousine slides through traffic, a brace of tiny, colourful flags flapping from its front corners. The windows are black and glossy, reflecting smeared versions of the surrounding skyscrapers, fingers of metal and glass reaching impossibly high into the blue, cloudless sky.

Bahram watches Lower Manhattan pan past. His bodyguard sniffs, craning his head to see the antenna-studded summits. "People sure do love megaliths," he says, his voice a gravelly baritone. "First Stonehenge, now this."

"Indeed," says Bahram distantly. His sleeve is rolled up past the elbow, and in the crook is an intravenous line connected to a hanging sac of transparent fluid. He crosses his legs as he draws on his ebony cigarette holder, gaze sliding over the bicycle couriers and yellow taxicabs and throngs of people pushing along the clogged sidewalks. Horns honk.

Opposite the Hudson River rise tall wooden walls plastered in posters and advertising bills. Behind the walls loom half a dozen cranes, some hauling loads up, some letting loads down, others rotating slowly in place. The smoke and growl of hidden bulldozers wafts into the street. "They never stop building," continues the bodyguard philosophically. "It's never enough, hah?"

"New York is a monster," agrees Bahram, ashing his cigarette gingerly with a double-tap on the edge of the tray. "And we're about to proceed into the very belly of the beast, you and I."

The bodyguard shifts. "Are you worried?"

Bahram pauses. "I am," he admits. "I'm afraid of letting my father down."

"You expect trouble?"

"I don't. I have only to ask a single question, and memorize a one-word reply."

"That doesn't sound too tough."

Bahram nods vaguely, eyes still out the window. "Let us hope you are right."

The limousine slows outside of an ancient-looking ConEd utility building of vine-choked brick. A taxicab honks and darts around. The chauffeur waits for a break in traffic to open his door. Bahram detaches the IV and rolls down his sleeve, massaging his forearm. The bodyguard leans closer to the glass, squinting at a group of figures arranging themselves on the sidewalk beside the car. The men are bearded. Their faces are tight and hard and unforgiving. They each wear a black fedora and a long black coat.

"Who are these guys?" prompts the bodyguard.

Bahram stabs out his cigarette. "The Calumniatorian Guard."

"The what?"

"Hasidic assasins, my friend. Defenders of the rabbi." He smirks humourlessly. "Jewish ninjas."

The bodyguard narrows his eyes, noting how the men's right hands hover at their waists as they arrange themselves into two lines of three, a corridor of black coats and hats between the limousine and the ConEd building. "They're armed, Prince."

"They are," agrees Bahram. "If their scimitars fly, we have no hope."

"I'm armed, too."

Bahram smiles sadly. "It would not matter."

The chaffeur opens the door and steps aside. The bodyguard stoops to squeeze out onto the sidewalk, then straightens, casting a rough look at each of the Calumniatorians. He notes no reaction. They simply stare back, their long beards and curled sideburns swaying in the breeze. Bahram follows him out. He pays no mind to the Calumniatorians, striding purposefully through their fold and directly to the glass revolving door. The bodyguard checks over his shoulder once more before continuing inside.

The Calumniatorians break formation and follow wordlessly.

At the reception desk is a young woman wearing a modest, long-sleeved dress and a scarf in her hair. She watches them approach. "Prince Siraj," she says evenly. "You were to come alone."

"My father insists on certain reasonable protections," replies Bahram, his chin high. "I'll not be dissuaded."

She gives him a slight nod in concession, then looks at the squat, muscular bodyguard, scanning what little of his scarred, lantern-jawed face is visible beneath the hem of his hood. She turns back to Bahram. "He will have to disarm."

"We will not comply."

"That is unacceptable, Prince."

"So be it. We shall leave. Your masters can explain why the Shah's deal has been broken." Bahram shoots a meaningful look to his companion and they both abruptly turn back to the revolving door, now facing a row of expressionless Calumniatorians. Their hands quiver by the unseen hilts of their blades. Their brown eyes are beady and cold beneath the brims of their black fedoras.

"Wait."

Bahram turns, the corners of his lips curling subtly beneath his fine, inky moustache. He raises one brow.

The woman touches her ear, cocking her head as she listens to a concealed speaker. "It will be permitted," she continues, then turns to the bodyguard. "Please state your name for the registry."

"Comeuppance," he rumbles dangerously.

"Is that a surname or a given name?"

"It's all you ever need know, girl."

They are directed to an elevator. It descends deep. When the door clatters aside they find themselves facing a tall, thin man with a greying ginger beard and tufts of auburn hair sticking out from beneath a pinned yamulke covering his crown. He looks the pair up and down slowly, sucking his teeth. "Gentlemen," he says at last, "You're late."

"Forgive me, sir. We were delayed in traffic."

"It is not mine to forgive, Prince Siraj. The Sabbath waits for no man. You will be obliged to complete your business before the sun sets."

Bahram shoots the cuff his cream-coloured suit and consults his Rolex. "Very well."

"You're here to see the artifact, of course."

"Of course."

"I'm Dr. Leibowitz. I'll be serving as your escort. Please, we can't dally. If you'll walk this way?"

"Thank you, Doctor."

Dr. Leibowitz casts a fleeting, anxious glance at the silent bodyguard and then turns and begins walking swiftly down a dim hall, lit in small pools by naked bulbs hanging from the water-stained ceiling. He unlocks and opens a corroded metal door at the end, then carefully makes it fast behind them.

They proceed through a series of stone catacombs as old as the first Dutch settlers on the island. Pale limestone stalactites hang from the ceiling like icicles, dripping intermittently upon their stalagmite partners down below. By the meagre glow of the widely-spaced lamps Bahram notes Hebrew characters carved into the walls, indicating directions down various shadowed turns.

The bodyguard touches his elbow and whispers, "I've been under every part of this city, in every sewer and pipe, but I've never seen any of this."

"Naturally," Bahram whispers back. "If you had, you'd be dead."

"Easier said than done."

Bahram chuckles drily. "It has been done before. To your kind and worse. These people are not to be underestimated, my friend. That has been done, too, and the consequences were ugly." His mouth tightens briefly into a bloodless line. "This is a hard-won truce we enjoy."

Leibowitz looks back over his shoulder. "Hurry," he says. "Time is running out for you, Prince."

In the final stretch of dank corridor dust rains from the vaulted ceiling in time to the muted pounding of machines at work up above. Bahram realizes that they are walking directly beneath the mammoth construction project by the Hudson they saw from the limousine. "Doctor, may I ask what you are building up there?"

"A shield," answers Leibowitz without turning around. "There is some concern about our operation being detected from above -- thermal leaks, visible in the infrared to aerial surveillance."

"Sputniks?"

"Yes, certainly -- Sputniks and more. The space age has just begun. Keeping secrets is about to become exponentially more difficult." He pauses to unlock another heavy door, easing it closed behind them as Bahram and his bodyguard wait beside the reinforced jamb. "That's why we're putting hundreds of tons of concrete and steel over our heads, to better masque our activities," he continues. "Once complete, the two principal towers will be the tallest free-standing structures on Earth."

"Who will occupy the towers?"

Leibowitz shrugs. "Financial concerns, mainly. The Rockefellers are calling it the World Trade Centre."

Bahram smirks. "So it's a Jewish banking conspiracy, is it?"

Leibowitz fixes him with a sharp look, though his hazel eyes twinkle in amusement. "Don't make fun."

Bahram chuckles.

At the final door Leibowitz taps a complex code into a brass keypad on the wall, each alefbetic key clicking in turn. The door clanks loudly as the lock disengages. Leibowtiz hauls it open and gestures at the visitors to proceed.

"Gentlemen," he says, "behold a sight few goyim ever see: our inner sanctum -- the Mine of Truth."

They emerge between two Caluminiatorians flanking the door and into a wide hall with a vaulted ceiling decorated by intricate mosaics of dense, Arabesque patterns and Hebrew glyphs. They stand on a balcony gilded by a brass railing, and in the yawning pit below are hundreds of Hasidic scientists hard at work. They wear black fedoras and white labcoats, the ends of tzitzit fringes dangling at their waists as symbols of their devotion to Yahweh. The activity is brisk and businesslike, calls in Yiddish and English echoing off the walls. "What's all the hub-bub?" asks the bodyguard.

"Dusk approaches," says Leibowitz. "All work stops for the Sabbath. Come now, we have no time to waste. Follow me, gentlemen. Quickly."

"But what are they doing?" the bodyguard persists.

"They're decoding the Tanakh," he says, urging them along the railing toward a spiral staircase. "The Pentateuch, if you prefer. They're working to extract sod, the true messages of God, hidden in the text."

"Kabbalah," explains Bahram.

"Precisely," agrees Leibowitz, drawing a fob-watch on a golden chain from his vest and glancing at it anxiously. "Hurry now!"

The bodyguard squints, his wide mouth frowning. "But why? What messages?"

"Our study is deveikus," says Leibowitz as he rushes down the stairs ahead of them. "A part of the ongoing communication between God and man -- as we unravel the vibrations of the upper spheres of Creation we influence the harmonics, changing God as He changes us. The more we learn, the closer to Him we come. It is this intimacy that propagates da'at, giving rise to time and the shape of history."

The bodyguard blinks. "Hah?"

They reach the bottom of the staircase and rush down a narrow alley between laboratory tables where Hasidic scientists are quickly but methodically loading their apparatus away into boxes marked in rows of Hebrew script. As they pass by Bahram and the bodyguard take in the enigmatic tanks of fluids connected by bundles of cabling. Some of the tanks shimmer as oscillatations induced by small motors slosh back and forth through their volumes.

"We seek to understand the ten sephirot, the planes of Creation enfolded around God," explains Leibowtiz. "This group is calibrating the initial conditions of an experiment exploring the interaction of Gevurah and Yesod frequencies in a kosher medium. The group opposite is collating the data points with specific Tanakh passages and vowel strings."

The bodyguard sniffs, a mischievous glint in his eye. "I thought the Bible was just a bunch of stories."

Leibowitz offers him a half-smile. "And so shall seem the skyscrapers above to be just a bunch of buildings."

Toward the end of the hall is a zone under construction, separated from the working area by a wall of translucent plastic sheeting. Beyond the sheeting the silhouetted forms of Hasidic engineers and workmen stow their tools and clang shut their cases. Bahram cranes his head, taking in what appears to be a large, curving cave cut into the bedrock behind them. "More tunnels, Doctor?"

Leibowitz shakes his head. "Particle accelerator. It runs clear under Jersey."

The bodyguard frowns. "How does an atom smasher decode secret messages?"

"The laws of creation are written into every part the world...sir. With the energies that will be available to us once this unit is complete, we hope to be able to probe all seventy-two true names of God."

The bodyguard blinks, puzzled. Bahram shakes his head dismissively.

They pass out of the great hall and through another metal door with a brass keypad. On the other side the temperature drops sharply. Bahram and his bodyguard can see their breath. "Almost there," reports Leibowitz, consulting his fob-watch again. "Let's keep up the pace, gentlemen."

Giant insulated pipes are suspended above them, their surfaces clung with frost. They all snake toward a common centre, disappearing through a wall with heavy steel doors marked in orange and black warning stripes next to a small window of double-paned bullet-proof glass. An old man in a wide-brimmed fur cap and sumptuous fur coat stands at the window, watching them warily.

A platoon of Calumniatorians is ranged around the walls, hands on the hilts of their blades.

Leibowitz toggles a contact beneath the grille and says a few words of Yiddish. The man behind the window makes a sour face as he looks the visitors up and down, fleshy lips drawn into a pout. "Not that one," he says in English, pointing to the bodyguard. "It cannot pass."

Bahram clears his throat. "I will not concede to --"

"There's no time, Prince," interrupts Leibowitz. "If you want to see the artifact, you must do so now and you must do so alone. The minutes are passing: choose."

Bahram hesitates, then nods.

"Boss --" begins the bodyguard, stepping closer.

Bahram holds up a hand. "Stay, Lallo. I cannot fail my father. You will remain here."

The bodyguard closes his mouth, grimacing darkly, heavy brow beetled.

The steel doors part. Leibowitz stands aside. Bahram takes a breath and then walks through the opening. The doors close behind him. Red bubble lights spin on the walls beside a white clean-suit hanging from a peg. Bahram pulls it on over his finery, then slips elastic-edged booties over his shoes and a pair of plastic gloves over his hands. Finally he drops the hood down over his face, his vision slightly obscured by the glare of red highlights on the transparent plastic visor.

A guttural, heavily-accented voice sounds through an overhead speaker: "Ingress eight thirty-seven; Bahram Siraj, Prince of Anwar; year fifty-seven twenty-four; twenty March, nineteen sixty-four."

The red lights die. Green lamps illuminate. The doors ahead split.

Bahrams steps into the inner chamber, heart pounding in his chest. The doors close behind him, sinking him into near-total darkness. His own breathing is loud inside the hood. He is unsure how to proceed.

But then his eyes adjust, prying from the gloom a set of very dim amber lamps in the middle of the chamber. He looks around. The giant pipes all lead there, too, to a throne of silhouetted machinery with rivulets of fog cascading down its sides. Overhead, a massive fan slowly beats.

He takes a tentative step forward. This is it: the artifact!

He is startled as a ring of smaller lights illuminates, revealing a tapered dais covered in wires. Now he can make out that there is something resting atop the upper pedestal, shadowed and still.

It is a head.

Bahram furrows his brow, feeling a cold sweat released from his skin. He steps closer again, plastic booties hissing on the metal floor. As he nears the artifact his breath catches in his throat: the thing stirs.

Though the details are hard to discern in the amber gloom Bahram can see its skin, lined and wrinkled like ancient leather, and he can see two black voids where the eyes should be. The holes seem to faintly glint. The lips, wizened and cracked, move slightly apart, crumbles of dust falling from their corners.

Bahram fights down his sense of panic. His every instinct is commanding him to flee this horrid, alien thing.

Instead he does his duty, closing his eyes and then opening them again as he speaks with the clearest voice he can muster: "Is...is it time?"

A voice like cobwebs replies, windy and almost unintelligible, "No."

Bahrams blinks. That's it. This is what the Shah has sent him to do, and he has done it. Now, after it is finished, he feels a strange sense of anticlimax. He jumps when a speaker on the wall behind him crackles. "Prince, the Sabbath is nigh. We must restabilize the artifact and lock down the system!"

He nods slowly to himself, backing away from the pedestal.

"Prince!" crackles the speaker again, Leibowitz's voice edged with urgency.

Bahram turns to go. He waits for the metal doors to open again but before they do he hears the disembodied head shift again, another fine rain of dust tumbling from its disintegrating lips. Contrary to everything Bahram has been told to expect, the artifact speaks again. And what it says causes a violent shiver to slither across his shoulders, making the skin of his scalp crawl.

It says, "Soon."