Nest of Worlds (26 page)

I write the numbers of the nested worlds—3, 5, 8, 13—but can’t find a formula for them. A tough froze! Without the 8, they would all be odd numbers, increasing. But that’s not much of a pattern; it doesn’t have the precision of the others. If you put 7 or 11 in the place of the 8, you have a sequence of primes, but then there’s no 2. I don’t know.

Finally a little humility in that redhead, thought Gavein.

* * *

In the Bolyas’ old apartment several creeps moved in, the kind who shaved their heads. They usually wore green tunics with red epaulets. Two girls and three guys, dividing the rent among them equally. Daphne was suspicious. She counted the dozens of beer cans thrown in the garbage. The cans were neatly stuffed into plastic bags, but one time squirrels tore open a bag, and they spilled out. The people drank quietly, without uproars.

Gary and Daphne, on the other hand, threw a party with much stamping of feet and bottles of port. The occasion was the publication in a local paper of Daphne’s article on what movers did: two whole columns of text. A bottle was overturned, and port got into the upholstery of the divan. Worse, the tub drain clogged and water seeped through the ceiling of the creeps below. An apology had to be made.

The girl who opened the door was thin as a rail. An even line of straight hair fell over half her face; the other hemisphere of her skull was shaved to a brushlike stubble. Her green tunic ended at mid-thigh, and her legs were bare.

The explanation Gary launched into became increasingly awkward.

When he finished, the girl said, “I’m Margot.”

He realized he hadn’t introduced himself. He did.

“No problem with the water,” she said. “We’re going to be painting anyway. But you won’t be doing that again, right?”

They exchanged phone numbers: simpler to call than walk down.

The new neighbors were OK.

One afternoon he and Daphne returned from the market. (Although Gary drove a truck, he didn’t own a vehicle privately; for marketing he had to use mass transit.) Furniture was being delivered to the people below. The three guys in green tunics struggled with the heavy pieces; the girls carried the lighter things: stools, flowerpots.

Gary helped them unload a large wooden table with a broken corner. The ungainly piece had been fitted into the van with difficulty, and getting it out wasn’t easy either. More gashes were added in the process.

Daphne looked at the table, at the inside of the van, and at the men doing the lifting. “Nothing to worry about,” she told them. “You can hide that with a little shoe polish.”

Gary panted under the weight of the table.

“Nice table,” Daphne said to Margot. “It’ll be just right for the dining room.”

“I got it at Morley’s. It was on sale, because it’s damaged.”

The other woman, Jutta, dropped a flowerpot with a ficus, and soil fell out. Swearing, she gathered the broken pieces and the soil and threw them in the garbage can. She stuffed the ficus in too, breaking its stalks.

“Fucking plant,” she said, out of breath. Her faded jeans were tight on her powerful thighs. When she bent over, the pants seemed close to splitting open. Gary could practically hear the seams rip. But the pants held.

I’ve calculated the time of staying in a Land for the world of Linda and Jack (where n = 4). It’s 3 8/9 years, or 1,419 days. Another piece in the puzzle.

Daphne stepped
out of the bath and put on a gray bathrobe. Its color went with her hair, which she wrapped in a striped towel.

Even the hot water hasn’t relaxed her, Gary thought, seeing her frown.

She fell into an armchair. Her few physical charms showed through the bathrobe. Her cleavage was covered with freckles. Gary handed her a beer.

She choked on the first swallow. But with the second, her gaze steadied.

“Sometimes, Gary, you’re as self-possessed as a corpse,” she said.

“Huh?” He blinked, with the pink irises of an albino.

“You didn’t say a word when you were carrying the Bolyas’ table.”

“Ah . . . right.” He was slow. “I thought so.”

“No doubt about it. I saw the manufacturer’s mark.” Her dark eyes fixed on Gary.

“What does this mean?”

“I thought about that in the tub. The green tunics are mafia. They kill the people who move and take their things, and the border guards of Tolz look the other way. There’s probably an accomplice among the guards.”

“It makes no sense. Why keep the evidence?”

“Greed.”

“If you’re right, this is awful. We should tell the police.”

The police didn’t take Daphne’s story very seriously.

For the next job, Gary was unable to park his rig in front of the building: there was a new red Amido there. Jutta and Margot were washing the car. Sudsy water ran along the gutter.

It was the Bolyas’ Amido, down to the broken headlight, broken turn signal, and chipped paint.

“How do you like our new purchase?” asked Jutta. “We got it at Morley’s.”

Gary examined the car.

“It was in an accident,” Daphne couldn’t help saying.

“Yeah. We’re cleaning it up,” said Margot, rubbing at a bloodstain with her rag. “Because of the blood, we got it for even cheaper. I was spooked, but the boys talked us into it.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” agreed Jutta. “Look at that upholstery.”

“Use a strong detergent,” advised Gary, taking his cue from Daphne.

“If we can’t get the stains out, we’ll replace it. It’ll still be worth the trouble,” said Stack, joining the conversation. He wore a green tunic.

Gary and Daphne went to the police again, and again the police dismissed the story. They were seen by the same officer as before. This time he wore a T-shirt with the words
Municipal Police
. On the back of the chair hung a uniform jacket that had his name sewn on:
Lieutenant Benjamin Cukurca
.

Cukurca was old and completely gray. When he was agitated, his eyes watered, and he stroked the sparse hair plastered across his pate.

“Impossible,” he said, his glassy eyes bugging even more than usual. “The Bolyas are in Tolz. A report came in yesterday.”

He wouldn’t even listen to their arguments. Why should he waste his time?

Between the pages were two index cards with Zef’s writing.

Today I put down the two formulas I worked out, one beside the other:

The number of Lands = (n + 2)
2
.

The number of Significant Names = 144 x 12
(n -
1)
.

I left out the number of versions of
Nest
of Worlds
as well as the time of staying in a Land, since so far no pattern suggests itself. So far.

I dislike the inelegance of the second formula. If this is supposed to be a fundamental law governing the nested worlds, every constant that appears in it (every number, Dave!) should mean something. I think I have too many (there are three: 144, 12, -1) for a basic relation, and the first two are too big.

How to simplify? Intuitively I feel they should be reduced to small constants like 1 or 2, factored down.

The pattern for number of Lands doesn’t look bad: only one constant, 2.

And the second card:

I returned to this problem after an hour break. I have the feeling that if I keep digging into my head (through one nostril or another), there will be some harvest soon.

We need to look differently on these patterns. The number of Names in a given nested world equals:

144 x 12
(n -1)

I must have had one heck of a froze not to have seen that this is also:

12 x 12 x 12
(n -1)

Or simply: 12
(n + 1)
!

Much prettier. Do you see how superior it is to the one before? I got rid of one of the numbers, and at hardly any cost: replacing a -1 with a +1.

This is how one does science—tracking down nature’s bright ideas. Some lightbulbs did go on in my skull before, but lately I’ve been unfocused, distracted, because of the deaths.

Dave, no doubt you’re bored to tears with this cogitating and number juggling, this replacing of one constant with another. Well, maybe you’re right, and it’s all silly, just the mental contortion of a science nut playing with a book. And yet this is good exercise, staying in form, because in science first you find the relations that join fact to fact, and then you try to simplify those relations as much as you can, in order to see the deeper sense in them . . .

Dr. Nott suggested that he see for himself what Ra Mahleiné looked like inside. First, for comparison, she allowed him to look inside herself. She opened her mouth wide and tilted her head back. He peered in. The interior resembled the hall of a great factory.

Strong, elastic tendons joining massive muscles crossed space like stairs, like bridges; reddish belts of muscle, vein, nerve went in different directions. All this machinery of flesh moved rhythmically; one could hear the muffled beat of a distant, powerful engine. From the slight gaps in the joints among the pulsing vessels, drops of blood or colorless juices seeped. Seen from inside, the hanging double chin of Dr. Nott resembled a mountain slope covered not with rocks but with yellow-orange bladder spheres in a spiderweb weave of tubes that carried blood. Gavein thought that turkeys had such air sacs in their wattles, and that was why they tried to fly. He dared to look up: the ceiling was lost in darkness, and below it hung, like gigantic icicles, tongue-pink protuberances. He also saw the tonsils: yellowish, bulging, potatolike. When he strained his eyes upward into the darkest gulf, there loomed the enormous surface of the brain, smooth as a ball, a deep-brown honey color. It slowly dripped into a huge funnel that was suspended on pink membranous ropes and ties. From this funnel flowed a mixture of red blood and a yellowish fluid.

“The dripping signifies that I’m thinking,” said Dr. Nott. “If I wasn’t thinking, you would see no fluid. And now look inside your Magda.”

The interior of Ra Mahleiné’s body was similar, at first glance identical.

The same dark hall, the bridges of tissue, the stairways of pulsing tendon, the conduits of veins and nerves, the giant brain in far darkness. The only difference was that into the funnel placed below the brain a considerably greater quantity of fluid dripped.

Ra Mahleiné thinks a lot more than the doctor, Gavein thought with pride. He had always suspected that Dr. Nott was not that bright.

“Look closely” came the doctor’s voice.

He examined the interior with more care. He hadn’t noticed them before, but they were everywhere, on the veins, on the tonsils, on the red bridges: fleshy cauliflower spheres, deeply rooted in the floor. All the other parts were dim, toned down, as if faded. Only the cauliflowers flourished with an enviable, triumphant, pink vitality. He looked at the brain of Ra Mahleiné, mighty in the dark, and it too, like a firmament speckled with stars, was covered with these evil pink growths. One of the cauliflowers was growing at the mouth of the funnel and would soon block it. As Gavein watched, a bridge leading deep into the giant hall that was the body of Ra Mahleiné buckled under the weight of its burgeoning cauliflowers and fell like a limp rag. The spheres began to eat it voraciously, until they had consumed it completely, uniting to make one, furrowed, intensely pink, massive growth.

“You see, Dave. There’s no hope. It’s a lost cause.”

He wanted to shout, to defy the spheres, to tear them and remove them, but of course there was no way he could enter the body of Ra Mahleiné.

As if a hand had him by the throat, he was unable to cry out, and yet he heard a cry. Someone was calling. The dream slowly dissolved.

Ra Mahleiné repeated his name. Kneeling on the sidewalk, she was holding the head of Lorraine, who lay still.

“Gavein, call an ambulance! Tell Nott to come immediately, or someone else.”

Gavein’s mind cleared. He jumped from his chair.

“She was hit by a fragment from the helicopter. She’s conscious, but it has paralyzed her.”

An unknown doctor answered the phone and promised to send an ambulance.

Lorraine could not say what hurt her the most. She spit blood. There was a stabbing in her legs, a numbness, the same in her arms.

“It’s time for me now, Dave?” she said, with a pleading look. “I did my best. Magda didn’t complain . . .”

Her voice, usually high and piping, was hoarse now. On the other side of the street an aluminum bar from the copter clattered to the pavement. Lorraine had been struck with two pieces: the first, larger fragment in the back; then, when she fell and rolled, a piece of a pipe hit her in the stomach. Several other fragments had fallen on the street in the course of the day. The two women had been watching as if it were a show: the objects almost motionless in the sky, then suddenly accelerating, to strike the pavement or buildings like bullets. None of them fell so close as to alarm the women. Ra Mahleiné had been knitting. Lorraine had gotten up to make some tea when she was hit. Ra Mahleiné had barely lifted her eyes from her work when the second missile reached Lorraine on the ground. On the sidewalk lay the metal fragments, indifferent to the tragedy they had caused.

Gavein saw in time that Lorraine was going to throw up; he turned her on her side, so she wouldn’t choke. She vomited long and abundantly, first dark blood, then bright. With a groan she lost consciousness.

They heard the ambulance siren, but Lorraine’s body began to twitch.

“She’s dying,” Ra Mahleiné said.

The ambulance drove up, and the medics began resuscitation: oxygen, massaging the heart. It didn’t help. The physician pronounced death from internal bleeding, and the body was removed. On the sidewalk a pool of darkening blood remained.

“What was her Name?” asked Ra Mahleiné.

“
Aeriella
. It fits. Be careful: you have the same Name, and the explosion isn’t over.”

“You do too.”

“I? David Death?” He shook his head.

He helped his wife up, put an arm around her waist, and led her inside. Through her clothes he felt how thin she was, and hard, like a swollen belly. He said nothing, and had she asked him a question then, he would have been unable to speak. He understood that he held a treasure that was lost to him.

“You know, that blow, I remember it only generally. The details began only when you woke. Before that, also, I felt no pain . . . Please, read,” she said as he put a blanket around her.

In her nightshirt she looked even more pathetic.

“Your Little Manul will go to sleep like a good girl and wake up strong and healthy. Just start reading.”

This absurd idea she has got into her head, he thought. He also noticed what little impression Lorraine’s death had made on her. Sighing, obeying, he reached for the book.