Napier's Bones (29 page)

“The numbers lay
fallow for hundreds of years, Dom,” said Arithmos, surprisingly still intact.
“When the Globe was rebuilt, they sought it out. All they wanted was their
original piece of the ecology, old wood or new.”

“If they’re a
part of the ecology, then how is it they’re not turning against me?”

“They may yet,”
replied Arithmos. “When Napier and his ilk arrive. But for the moment they’re
content to stay in place. A sure sign that Shakespeare was a numerate, I would
say. Even over the centuries he’s managed to exercise control over them.”

There was a new
commotion in the middle of the metal and stone beasts, followed by a loud
crash. Dozens of them fell to the ground, and from out of the middle of the
swarm stepped Jenna.

The distance
between Jenna and Dom was infinitesimally small, she discovered. She could almost
reach out and touch him, but held back, still unsure of what she could do, more
unsure of what she
should
do. Whatever it was that had been causing
him trouble—Napier or something fashioned by Napier or his numbers—seemed to
have left off, and although for the moment he seemed little more than a hazy
blur to her, she could tell that he was safe, or at least as safe as he could
be under the circumstances.

Instead of going
right to him, then, she continued to forge a path in his direction, a passage
that was as circuitous as possible. And circuitous not just in physical
distance but in time as well. The further she travelled the easier it was to
focus on learning from the numbers and to use less of her attention on the
actual travel. Less focus on the travel and therefore her surroundings meant
less focus on time, which paradoxically meant that less time actually changed
for her. Soon enough she found she had gone almost the entire length of
Britain, from the Point of Stoer in Scotland to the outskirts of Cambridge. The
numbers swirling around her showed that she’d walked almost 500 miles to this
city north of London, but she could just as easily have walked from one end of
the USU campus to the other; she felt no exhaustion or hunger at all.

Jenna stood at the
side of a now-busy road, surrounded on all sides by suburbs, surprised to find
herself there so soon. “Heisenberg spent some time here not long after the
war,” said Quanta. “But we first took special notice of him when he came to
lecture in St. Andrews in Scotland. That was when he presented us with the
notebook, for safekeeping and for the possibility that one day someone would
arrive who could control the numbers he and his people had unleashed onto the
world.”

“I can’t find
him,” said Jenna, frowning and waving off the history lesson. “Where’s Dom?
Where’s Billy?” She looked briefly to the numbers and then turned attention
back in the direction of the unseen London skyline. “Do you know where they
are?”

“We don’t,” was
the reply. “And if we actively try to look for him, we’ll only bring on
Napier’s attention. Patience is the key now. Wait for them to show themselves.”

“But these
numbers I’ve been shown, this quantum view of the world, that’s another way.”
Jenna squeezed together her fists in frustration. “How can something like that
bring on Napier’s attention? Why is it that suddenly I find myself here and
close to Dom and suddenly I can’t see him anymore?”

“All of this
time learning from us and still you don’t understand,” said Quanta. “This is
why we were worried about you rushing in too quickly. Without a complete
knowledge of the gift you’ve been given and the responsibilities it imparts,
anything you do will be dangerous, to you and to everyone else.”

Jenna responded
with a curt nod. “Anything I do will have consequences that reach beyond what
normal mathematics is capable of dealing with, I understand,” she said. “I also
understand that if Napier is allowed to regain control of his bones, not only
does his own body come back, but then the change in his own control of numbers
will make things all the worse. For everyone: numerates, regular people, and
for numbers too. Right?”

The numerical
being—so different from their previous companion, differences that she wondered
if any other numerate would even be able to sense—paused for a moment, and then
seemed to nod its head, a rush of numbers tumbling up and down, disappearing
and then reconstituting in multiple locations, once even to the point that it
seemed to be casting a numerical shadow as well, or perhaps a faded
doppelgänger, a momentary replica from somewhere and somewhen else. “We are
willing to admit that you could be right, as small as that chance is,” said
Quanta. “Although we feel you could deal with Napier well enough sometime
further into the future, there is no guarantee that he would allow you to live
that long once he got word of your existence.”

“Get him now,
while he’s still in my mother’s body and not hanging onto the Bones, or run and
hide and hope that he doesn’t find me before I’m able to handle the new and
improved version.” With some hesitation, the numbers nodded, and Jenna pressed
on. “But that’s less important to me. Right now, the only idea is to save Dom
and Billy. Everything else is secondary.”

The numerical
being broke apart and flashed through the air and into Jenna with a great rush
and briefly staggered her, and as it did so it spoke one last time, directly
into her mind:
In that case, we are here and at your service.

And then, at
that very moment, there was an enormous explosion of numbers deep in the heart
of London, reaching up to the sky like the roiling, angry cast-off of a
negative image nuclear bomb and dark enough to cast the day into an angry and
horrible shadow, and Jenna knew where she needed to go.

Just as Dom
noticed Jenna, a horrific grinding noise rattled the air, the sound of a buzz
saw cutting through thick layers of rusted metal accompanied by teeth, not
nails, scraping along a blackboard. Dom flinched, but when the noise had
stopped he saw that all the statuary beasts had come to a halt, some in
mid-step; the two still flying overhead plummeted to earth. The stone one
crashed through the roof above the seats before falling in smaller pieces to
the ground, its metal cousin crumpled and dented close by.

Numbers still
swam through the air, ferociously trying to attack them, but whatever mojo the
stage offered was holding up well for them. Dom looked down at the box in his
hands, saw that the Bones had stopped spinning. Numbers from them rushed off in
a horizontal vortex towards Jenna, but instead of running into her or even
dodging around her, they dissipated in seemingly random sequences, and then
some even seemed to reappear, although in a much more mellow mood than they had
been an instant before, floating aimlessly off into the sky.

“Dom!” shouted
Jenna, gesturing wildly.

Dom waved back,
then felt a blinding pain in his head and staggered to his knees, the theatre
spinning past his eyes. He put a hand to the back of his skull, felt the rising
lump and the wet smear that told him he was bleeding, then closed his eyes when
he realized which hand he was using.

He wasn’t
holding the Bones anymore.

Arithmos reached
out and touched his wounded skull.

Jenna ran from
the encroaching spotlight and numbers, turned around to see Dom spin the Bones.
A swirling, sparkling tornado of numbers completely engulfed him for a moment,
and then dropped away, and Dom was no longer there. The spotlight wavered and
then also disappeared, but the numbers with it did nothing of the sort, instead
turned their attention to her, racing over the grasses and heather in her
direction, steam rising from the heat of the attention of numbers and sunshine,
those numbers light enough to be prone to its effect momentarily tumbling upwards
in the rising heated air. Jenna stumbled and caught herself, ran hard in the
direction Arithmos had told her to go.

The numbers came
hard at her, but at the last second they dissolved, seemed to jump in one
direction or another or even both—it was so hard for her to tell—and then,
after one horrifically frightening moment in which they all seemed to multiply
into a seemingly infinite series, they were all gone. Jenna blinked in
surprise, then followed the path at a slow jog for as long as she could keep it
up, before finally settling into an easy walk, dictated partly by exhaustion
and partly by the weather and the state of the path.

Eventually more
numbers rose up from nowhere, but these ones made no move towards her, only
came into being and then faded away once she had passed them, to be replaced by
similar numbers further along. Signposts of a sort, she hoped, marking the
trail for her.

After twenty
minutes or so she saw that the numbers no longer showed her the main path, and
instead led her off trail and through heather and over rocks. She looked
around, saw no sign of anyone following, and trudged off the trail to follow
the numbers, uphill at an angle that, while not terribly easy, was at least not
straight up. On the trail or off, there was not much of anything she could see;
the rain was no longer coming down and the wind had finally died, but clouds
had descended low enough to brush against the ground. The sense of isolation
she felt was complete. Even the sounds of the wind and the waves and the seabirds
were muffled, so distant that she sometimes feared she had slipped away and
into another world.

Finally,
though, she came to a small pile of stones, the largest of them about the size
of a decent hardcover dictionary, with the last set of numbers resting atop of
them. A wet and cranky-looking black and brown cat sat beside the rocks,
licking at the edge of one paw and watching her approach. She stopped and
squatted down about twenty feet away from it, unsure what she was to do now.

The cat stood
and pawed at the stones, and they broke apart, each piece turning itself into a
constituent group of smaller pieces, until eventually all of them had crumbled
into nothing but dust. Then it stepped back, and she stood and cautiously
approached, having no idea what she might find.

All of this Dom
had seen, but now he was back in his body again, blinding pain in the back of
his skull as Billy tried to pull him up to his knees. “What’s happening?” he
asked.

“You’re back?”
asked Billy. “You were knocked unconscious.”

Dom tried to
shake his head, wincing in pain at the motion. “I wasn’t. I was in Jenna again,
but this time it was earlier, just after we parted.”

Billy started to
say something, then stopped. “Never mind right now. We have trouble.”

But before Dom
could react, he found himself spinning away to Jenna’s past once again.

Jenna reached
down into the dust where the cat had pawed, and the cat itself stepped around
to the other side of the crumbled rocks, always keeping a careful eye on her.
After a few seconds of searching she pulled out a wooden box about the size of
a video cassette.

“We have, over
the centuries, taken to storing artefacts in various safe places,” came a voice
from behind her. Startled, she turned, hands in front of her face and ready to
fight or, more likely, to run. But then she relaxed; it was Arithmos. “With
some of these artefacts, we’ve had no idea what would ever be done with them,
if there would ever be anyone who could successfully
and
safely use
them.” It gestured at the box. “This is one of those items. Truth be told, we
never expected there would be a time where this artefact would be unveiled.”

She looked at
it. The wood was rough, unvarnished and not sanded. Instead of hinges, two pieces
of leather were tacked to the body and to the lid, and it was held closed by a
length of ancient string. “
Safely
use it?” She didn’t like the sound
of that.

“We’ve watched
you from the beginning of this odyssey of yours,” said Arithmos. “How could we
not notice how unable we are to interact with you? At least, in terms of the
mathematical ecology as most numerates understand them.”

The clouds were
lifting, and Jenna looked out to the ocean, to a tall jutting rock that thrust
up out of the water and to seabirds that wheeled around it, unknowingly
creating patterns that buffeted in the air behind them. She was suddenly struck
by a sense that she was on the top of that rock, leaning over the edge and
balanced precariously as she looked down into a new form of chaos.

“You know why?”

Arithmos seemed
to nod. “We believe so. Open the box and discover for yourself.”

She hesitated.
Even touching the box brought about all sorts of unbidden images, so clear and
at the same time so bizarrely indistinct. There was change in this box, somehow
she knew, and she wasn’t so sure it was change she would be able to keep in
check.

“Without this
artefact and the abilities it brings out in you, we know for sure that Dom and
Billy will not be able to last the next twelve hours,” said Arithmos. “Napier
has grown to the point where he is far too strong. Which means that Napier will
get his hands on his Bones, an event that will likely result in the extinction
of the numerical ecology as we know it, to say nothing of major changes to the
non-numerate world.”

“How so? What
exactly is it that Napier will do?”

“Even as an
adjunct, Napier is too powerful. Once reconstituted, everything changes. He’ll
have proven that he is no longer mortal, and will have control of all numbers.
You need to know that mathematics lies at the heart of the very existence of
the world and of the entire universe, even for something as intangible as the
forward motion of time. Eternity for Napier will be however he sees it, but we
can assure you that for us it will feel like a very long time. To say nothing
of what changes he makes will be wrought on humanity.”