Napier's Bones (9 page)

Sometimes,
rarely, they would pass a car or truck, and a couple of times were overtaken by
cars in a hurry to get to their destination, but the road was relatively
peaceful. There were no more numbers threatening them, in the distance or up
close, and Dom was used to this sort of lifestyle. He was constantly on the
road, moving from one city or town to another, always on the hunt for more
mojo, always looking for the one artefact that would put him over the top. Dom
figured that he would eventually make his way across the pond to Europe, but
there was so much still going on here in North America; many artefacts had come
across with the earliest settlers and had continued to come, finding their way
to lands where the history of numeracy had still been unwritten.

Ruth reeled off
primes in her mind, trying to force herself back to the surface, but no matter
what she did now, the numbers no longer wanted to work for her in any
meaningful way. Above and around her, the shadow that had taken control seemed
able to run her body without any special effort, and somehow she could tell
that he was aware of her own struggle, aware but apparently not at all
concerned.

She could still
see out of her own eyes, was a part of every physical thing that her body took
part in, but try as she might she could find no way to control any of it.
Everything she did and saw felt distant, like wearing a thick set of gloves to
turn the pages of a newspaper, or like looking through an antique window at the
leading edge of twilight.

More immediate
to her, after initially catching the edges of it, was the heavy sensation of
anger that emanated from him. No, not anger; rage. His fury was so complete,
and now that she was aware of, so overwhelming, that it took over everything
else.
This
, she could touch and see and feel. There was no sense of
distance anymore, and it scared her. Would she always be a party to his
emotions? More frightening, would she eventually be pushed completely under by
their strength, and eventually never find her way back to the surface?

She tried to
close off her mind to the emotions and concentrated again on primes, this time
not to fight her way back into control but just to keep herself afloat.

Perissos
iskhuros teos esti, hos ēs emeos
, said a voice inside her head.

She didn’t
recognize the voice or the language, and worried for a moment that he was
playing games with her while she was locked inside her own body. But still, she
decided to respond, perhaps with the faint hope that interaction would provide
her with a clue for how to escape. Who is that? she thought, not sure if she
was doing this right or, maybe, that she was buried so deep she’d already gone
insane and was talking to herself in different languages and with a male voice.

Metagignoskō,
nomizō. . . I’m so very sorry. It has been so long since I tried to communicate
with anyone that I forget that I am not speaking in your language.
It was
a man’s voice inside her head, thickly accented, although very oddly, like a
melange of accents from many different times and places.
What I tried to
tell you was that he is too strong for you, just as he was for me. Just as
he’ll be for anyone, I fear. Soon enough you’ll do as he asks, speak your voice
as his proxy.

These words were
not what she wanted to hear. Who are you? she asked again. How is it that
there’s another shadow in here, not just the one?

There was a long
period of silence, a hesitation that she felt directly, as if she was standing
there watching someone collect their thoughts before responding.
I’m told
my name is Archimedes,
said the man,
but that is only from what I’ve
been told, not from any memories of my own. All I recall is that I was wrenched
out of antiquity when he was very young, and I have been tied to him all these
centuries since, when he was both alive and dead.

Ruth felt a
charge of fear run through her then. If someone else could be stuck with her
shadow for all this time and not be able to manage any change or escape, what
chance did she have? Even worse, she realized that this might end up being her
own fate, sitting lodged deep inside her own body, so far down that eventually
she would lose whatever it was that defined her as a person, eventually to the
point that she would forget her name, her essence, become nothing but an
essentially voiceless shadow on display for nobody.
Why would he hold you
so close that your shadow still stays with his, centuries after his death? How
is he able to do this?

You do know
who it is who took control of your body, I trust?
asked the voice.

If Ruth could
have frowned she would have.
At first I thought maybe this was someone who
had been caught trying for the same thing I had been brought to,
she
replied.

You would be
wrong. How much do you know about John Napier the man?

It was like a
body blow. She knew what the likelihood had been, but had fought to deny it
until just now. Instead of trying to deny the reality of her situation any
further, though, Ruth cast back into her memories, trying to find what she’d
learned about him. If there’d ever been any mention about John Napier when she
was in school, aside from the small possibility that they’d been taught his
name in conjunction with the invention of logarithms, she couldn’t remember.
But in the years since, her wanderings in search of a numerate holy grail had
brought her to many sources that had, even if only in passing, mentioned John
Napier.
I know he was a mathematician, and inventor, too, in Scotland
around the same time that Shakespeare was alive. Probably a pretty powerful
numerate, too, I imagine.

The shadow
allowed itself a small chuckle.
Powerful is an understatement. An inventor,
yes. But one thing I know, listening in on his thoughts when I get the rare
chance, many of his inventions were exact duplicates of devices I had
apparently thought up so many aiōnes before.

He let that
thought hang in the air while Ruth chewed on it for a few seconds. Finally, she
asked, You mean to say he plagiarized you?

So it seems,
was the reply.
From what I’ve been able to gather, reading and listening to
Napier, and from the few memories I have of that time, he was looking for ways
to curry favour with the leaders of his country in order to gain access to
artefacts that would enable his numerate growth. It did not take long for him
to become what is likely the most powerful numerate ever. A status he may still
hold, hundreds of years after his death and controlling the body of a hapless
woman and the sorry, forgetful shadow of a long-dead man with a knowledge of
ancient Greek.

The most
powerful ever. Ruth didn’t doubt it, right now didn’t doubt anything other than
her ability to get out from under him.

Dom decided they
would stop in the town of Drumheller for a late lunch, coasting along a dry,
brown landscape into the town; once there, Jenna commented on all of the
statues of dinosaurs that sat beside the road. In the middle of pointing one
out she suddenly squealed with delight and told Dom to turn left. He did, and
ahead of him he saw an enormous dinosaur, a T-rex, he imagined, standing beside
a parking lot. Children and adults drifted by, not paying attention to him or
to any other traffic, so he inched along until he finally found a parking spot.

“That thing is
enormous,” said Billy as they climbed out of the car, tilting back Dom’s head
so he could see to the top. From inside the mouth a hand waved, and Dom
realized with a start that people could climb up the inside of the creature,
like a toothsome predatory version of the Statue of Liberty.

“I want to go
up,” said Jenna. She was grinning madly from ear to ear; this was probably the
first time she’d really felt happy since she’d fallen into this travelling
disaster.

Dom grinned
back, and after squinting his eyes at the dinosaur to check out the numbers and
obviously deciding that it was safe, nodded. “But first, let’s get some lunch.
I need to refuel before I climb that much.”

A restaurant
down the road took American dollars, and after a restroom break they each had a
burger and fries, and Dom ate a salad as well. Once they were done he told
Jenna to pull some money from her pocket and taught her how to remove the
serial numbers so they couldn’t be tracked. “You don’t actually physically
remove them,” said Dom. “It’s not like you’re using an eraser on paper. If you
did, pretty soon a non-numerate would catch you out and accuse you of trying to
pass some funny money.”

“So what do you
do?” She leaned across the table to get a better view, and Dom angled his body
to help.

“There’s
something like a coating on the numbers, which is the little bit of mojo that
the bills have that has combined with the numbers you have on your person, to
say nothing of the mojo of every other person, numerate or non-numerate, who
has ever handled the money.”

Jenna looked up
at him. “What, like all the stuff we carry?”

Dom shook his
head. “Not quite. More like, we leak. All the time, no matter how much you
protect yourself against it, your body is losing numbers, which then get
replenished.”

“It’s a very
large closed system,” said Billy. “Think of it as a kind of ecology of
numbers.”

“Or like
breathing,” said Dom. “Some numbers out, some numbers in.”

“Then what does
this do?” asked Jenna, holding up her wrist and tapping the wire wrapped around
it.

“Well, we leak,
but without the protection of something, whether it’s a temporary fix like a
series of prime or random numbers, or else something a little more solid, like
the wire, then to someone who is looking for us and knows our numerical scent,
it’s like we have a spotlight spilling from our bodies and lighting up the
sky.”

“A spotlight
bright enough to overpower the sun,” added Billy. “As long as you have the eyes
to see it.”

“Those numbers
pour out of every orifice, large and small, even microscopic, every second of
our lives. They’re the symbols of our lives, the factors that create and
re-create themselves every moment, reproducing in numerical form our lives
right down to the cellular—hell, probably the molecular or atomic—level.”

“And they’re
like fingerprints,” said Billy, waggling the fingers on Dom’s left hand, “so
the numbers that your body produces can be compared to the numbers from Dom’s
body and the difference spotted by anyone with the numeracy and the knowledge
to tell them apart.”

“Someone like
the person with the search numbers that keeps almost finding us.”

Dom nodded, and
said, “Right. So what we have to do is wipe away any scent of us in the
numerical traces we leave behind. Yes, you can take the physical numbers right
off as well. . . .” He smeared away the serial number on one bill, rubbing at
it while concentrating on a sequence that helped reduce the numbers to nothing.
“But if you watch how I work the numbers . . .” Here he concentrated and with a
press of his thumb placed the physical numbers back on the bill, then worked
them over so that the mojo numbers slid off and drifted up and through the
ceiling.

“If they go up
there, how do we know they won’t be found and we won’t be tracked down?” asked
Jenna, watching them as they slid through stained panelling and out of sight.

“If the numbers
stayed here in the restaurant, even if they fell to the floor, they’d leave a
pretty solid path for someone to follow,” answered Dom. “So what you have to
make sure is that when you free the numbers from their constraints, like I just
did, you have to give them a little push to make them ephemeral. Ghost-like,”
he said, seeing the question forming on her lips. “Once it gets freed from the
item that has factored its existence, which in this case is the rather tenuous
life of a twenty dollar bill, then it drifts up and breaks up somewhere high in
the sky, with individual numbers usually falling to earth and rejoining the
numerical ecology in all sorts of places, depending on the winds and the moods
of the numbers they seek to join.”

“You make them
sound almost intelligent.”

“Like we said
before,” responded Billy, “numbers do have some degree of autonomy. Ones that
numerates create can have even more, like the search numbers. But all are still
constricted by the natural order of the world. When Dom uses the word
mood
,
he could just as easily be talking about which bonds work and which ones don’t,
if you remember back to high school chemistry.”

Dom handed Jenna
another bill. “You try.”

She took it from
him and concentrated on getting a response from the numbers, just like Dom had
shown her. As she did, her focus seemed to waver for just a fraction of a
second and all the numbers jumped crazily around, seeming to replicate
themselves and even scatter like dominoes being knocked down after having been
set up. She closed her eyes to shut out the strange, sickly sensation it gave
her, and when she opened them again Dom was staring at her.

“Did you feel
that?” he asked her.

“Feel what?”

Dom shook his
head. “That’s the third time it’s felt like I’ve been inside your head, looking
out through your eyes, like I’m an adjunct for a second.”

Jenna frowned at
him, pursing her lips. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What I
did
feel, and see, was the numbers behaving very strangely for me.”

“I saw that,”
said Billy. “Did you not, Dom?”

Dom stared back
at her for a second, and then just shrugged his shoulders. “I . . . did, but
that’s not what I was talking about.” He shook his head. “Never mind.”