Mathématique: Chapter 32

One could not disappoint the dead. That was true. That was axiom.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 32

The wind came from the west. Rush stood at his open window and looked into the quiet dark. He rested his elbows on the narrow sill and hooked a hand over his shoulder. Threading his fingers beneath the collar of his white dress shirt, he pressed against the knot at the base of his neck.

He looked up.

The central plane of the galaxy cut the sky like the specter of a road.

Somewhere, miles from here, the mountains had begun to burn.

The rain was sparse and the wind was strong. It was fire season.

Soon, Young had said, they’d smell the smoke. See it.

Wind stirred the ends of his hair. He’d meant to cut it weeks ago, but such things weren’t so easy for a man confined to his apartment. To Cheyenne Mountain.

Loose papers shifted over the floor behind him.

He’d opened all his windows.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the wind, to shifting paper, whispering past the glass and metal and brick, rustling the dry leaves of the trees at the edge of the parking lot. There, it sounded like water. 

He didn’t like the water.

Air was a different matter. A different material state. Venerated as a classical element, studied by alchemists who granted it an iconography derived from cultres ancient and Ancient, then reclaimed for rationality by Black, by Priestly, by Cavendish, and by Lavoisier.

We must trust to nothing but facts.

Water, though.

For some reason, he’d begun dreaming of it almost every night. Something about the way John Sheppard had described Atlantis was stuck like a silver hook in his mind. These new dreams were bright, full of light. Crystal. Repetitive motion. They’d never, not once, featured drowning.

He dug at his neck, trying to ease the strain, wondering if it was contributing to this headache he couldn’t shake. It’d been with him for over a week—since the day he’d met Senator Armstrong and taught Vala the Latvian Gambit.

The week had been startlingly productive. Even for him. He’d slept on no set schedule, he’d cooked Young a handful of increasingly elaborate meals, and the math…

On the wall nearest the window, the solution to the seventh cypher stood out in dark streaks of permanent ink atop a deformable surface of layered paint. It’d take him less than a day to convert it into something Carter could give an empirical try. Perry was working the cypher he’d teed up for her. The transformation and coding required for Mathématique was done.

Academic dregs were all that stood between him and the ninth chevron.

(But was there a tenth?)

He ran a hand through his hair.

He missed San Francisco. Spread out over hills in a glittering technological crescent that encompassed Berkeley and Stanford and Silicon Valley, it unfurled from the shore of the sea. The closest equivalent to Altera that humanity possessed.

It was where he belonged—the merging edge of the biological and the mechanical.

Not in a desert retail park so dry it burned every bloody summer.

Gloria would’ve hated it here.

There’d’ve been nothing for her in Colorado Springs, had they come together, had she followed him. (Again.) He liked to think he wouldn’t’ve asked it of her. She hadn’t been happy in America, so far from her family, from everyone she’d known, almost everyone she’d loved.

(Ah fuck.)

Grief should be reductive. Like everything else.

Grief should yield to parsimony.

Grief was nothing but the biochemistry of separation yoked to awareness of loss.

Grief had no resolution. No solution set.

Grief was grinding endurance.

Grief was a slow fade, itself another form of loss. 

(Disrespectful.)

She watches a curtain of sheeting rain, glittering with stolen streetlight. Her hair is plastered to her forehead in tendrils. Her raincoat is a pale blue. He’s certain she won’t speak to him, but then—

“It’s really chucking it down out there.” Even staring into darkness, her voice is full of mischief and music.

“Too fuckin’ right,” he says.

She raises an eyebrow. Her disdain, laced with amusement, is arresting. As though she’s seen enough of the world to be gentle even with what she disapproves of.

“Too right,” he amends, catching her gaze and holding it, already climbing free of the bin she’s put him in.

“Are you a student?” she asks.

“Yes.” His elocution turns knife-sharp. “You?”

She nods. “Magdalen.”

“Floreat Magdalena,” he replies.

She angles her head in invitation.

“New College,” he says.

“Manners Maykth Man.” She gives him a mock curtsey.

“If only I had an umbrella to offer you.” He crisps his consonants, clips his vowels.

“You’re right round the corner.” She motions toward New College. “You’ll be out of this mess in no time.” She looks at the glittering curtain of rain beyond the shelter of Hertford Bridge.

“I’m not going back,” he says.

She arches a brow. “You realize that sounds terribly—” she begins.

“Dire, yes.” He huffs a laugh. “What I mean is, I’m late for work.”

“Thank God.” Again, that wicked smile. “I’m through with interventions for the night.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Long story,” she sighs, “featuring a rubbish pianist.”

“Typical,” he says.

“What is?” she asks. “Rubbish pianists?”

“Disappointment.” He smiles. It feels strange. Not something he’s made a habit of.

“You’ve an awfully nice smile for a cynic.”

“I prefer ‘pragmatist’,” he replies, avoiding a glottal stop. “What’ve you got there, then?” He gestures at the case strapped to her back.

“A violin.”

“You study music?”

She nods.

“Hmm.”

“What?” Her eyes glint in the light of the street lamps. There’s indignation and delight in her tone. She likes to be challenged.

“Nothing.” He shrugs, artfully artless. “Seems a bit useless, that’s all.”

“Music is the final abstraction,” she informs him, “the last, thin barrier between you and universal truth.”

He smiles at her then, really smiles, delighted and roguish. “No,” he says. “That would be maths. What’s your name?”

“Gloria,” she says.

Of course it is. Gloria.

“Nicholas Rush.” He looks into the rain, already inspired by the ease she projects, the amusement, the culture, the irony, the mischief. “Tell me,” he says, leaning into his own emerging charm, “is it difficult to become a pianist?”

“Yes,” she says.

He examines his nail beds. “I’m sure I could do it.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t.”

“You need a new one,” he says. “A new pianist.”

She laughs, and it sounds like chimes, like falling coins, like bright rain. “Are you asking me to go out?”

“No,” he says, surprising her, delighting in it. “I’m asking you to recommend a piano teacher.”

Rush snapped free of the memory, grounding himself in the press of his elbows into the windowsill, in the heel of the hand he dug into his eye socket, and in the wind that flowed over him.

He missed the rain.

Every day in Colorado Springs was the same.

It was all right.

The problem was only—

“I see you working your way to spontaneous human combustion.” Gloria’s hair tickles the side of his neck. Her fingers close around his elbow.

He doesn’t move. On the veranda, half the San Francisco Symphony chats and drinks and looks for well-endowed donors to flatter. Soon, the fog will roll in off the bay.

“I have six words for you, sweetheart.” Her lips graze the shell of his ear. “Last summer, set theory, six hours.”

Yes well. She has a point. She usually does.

“Be charming,” she advises. “Failing that, go tell the man in the purple tie that you detest Brahms and see what happens.” She points, delicately and subtly, at the symphony’s Musical Director with her little finger.

He flashes a smile, quick and wild, then lifts a flute of champagne from a passing tray with a deftness that surprises the circulating waiter. “I don’t detest Brahms,” he says archly.

“Yes you do,” she says, the words a melody of provocation. “You can stop pretending otherwise.

He quirks a brow, takes a sip of champagne, and walks toward Michael Tilson Thomas. 

Biochemistry. That was all that this was—the biochemical sequelae of loss. He took a breath, trying to offer no resistance to the dry darkness of Colorado Springs.

Everyone died.

Perhaps it’d been different for the Ancients. For some of them.

But what of their suffering cities, left abandoned a plane below those who’d cared for them?

He’d been possessed, for minutes on end, by the ghost of such a city. Released for reasons he couldn’t understand. It hadn’t wanted to let him go. He’d felt the truth of that.

He is taken.

His delicate carbon crystal hosts the communicating edge of a vast and alien sentience. Ideas break like waves against the wall of his mind, force themselves through narrow gates.

“To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.”

John Sheppard, his mind sinking in a rising mechanical tide, says, “You’re a wound that we can’t fix.”

The city poured its pain into the waiting receptacle of his mind, surging through pathways grief had carved like river water into soft ground.

He flinched.

Subjectivity didn’t matter. That was what made it subjective.

His logic was turning circular. (Never a good sign.)

What Gloria would’ve thought of this—Colorado Springs, his impersonal set of clean, white rooms, the trappings of a life he couldn’t bear to think of boxed behind a door he tried not to open—was immaterial.

What his brother might have thought was even more irrelevant.

One could not disappoint the dead. That was true. That was axiom.

He chews, delicately, the tip of a pen, contemplating a spread of mathematics, trying to stay focused and quit smoking at the same time. It’ll never take; he knows it.

“Nick,” Gloria says.

He doesn’t look up.

“Nick.”

Still, he doesn’t look up.

“Sweetheart,” she says.

Still, he doesn’t look up, but his whole attention is on her now. In his peripheral vision he sees her pull her hair free of its elastic tie and coolly stretch the band over her thumb and forefinger. She’s making a show of the thing: closing one eye, sighting down the length of her extended arm.

She flicks the hairband at him like she’s firing a gun.

He catches it one handed.

Gloria huffs. “Pay attention to me, you useless excuse for a spouse.”

“I’m busy,” he says around the pen in his teeth, doing a shite job holding a straight face. “Terribly, terribly occupied.”

“I see.” There’s a coy edge to the word. “I’ll start supper, then, shall I?”

He catches her wrist as she walks past, shoves his chair away from the table, and pulls her into his lap. “Don’t you dare.”

She harasses the collar of his shirt under cover of straightening it. “I’m happy to cook. Seeing as you’re soooo busy.”

The sky blue weave of her sweater is warm under his fingers. “Very subtle. What do you want?”

“What do the American Intelligentsia eat?”

He arches a brow. “Are there ‘American Intelligentsia?’ Not sure I’ve ever met one. Members of the Scottish Diaspora, certainly, but beyond that—”

“As though the Scots are any better.”

He smirks. “Crash ahead. Insult my people. See what effect such comments have on the remainder of your evening.”

“You’ve no follow-through when it comes to threats.”

“Untrue.” He pours the word like ice wine, sweet and cool and superlative. “You’re in a privileged position.”

He stands, and she slides from his lap with all the grace of a displaced concert violinist.

“Half an hour.” He sits again. Readjusts his glasses.

She pouts prettily.

He points at the kitchen with the pen he wishes was a cigarette.

She steals his papers, swiping them from the desk and sprinting for the kitchen.

He chases her.

He pressed his elbow into the sill of the window and drove his hand into his eye. The wind traced paths over his skin, through his hair, under his shirt.

He could tear himself apart against anything that suited him. And he would.

The ninth cypher was as good a choice as anything else.

Music: Sound and silence; melody and harmony; rhythm; dynamics; timbre; texture.

He’s not certain what proper audition protocol might be. He’s not bothered to ferret out niceties ahead of time. No point. Counterproductive, even, when he’s deliberately skirting social norms.

The room is hostile, a mix of malice and pity. Half the onlookers hope he’ll get his heart or his arse handed to him on a platter. He doesn’t look at Gloria Whitbourne, the way the light falls on her hair, on the red/gold curves of her violin. He doesn’t look at anyone. He stalks to the stage at the front of the Holywell Music Room, sits down at the piano, and digs into the opening of Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat Major as though striking spark from stone.

He’s not flawless, but he likes to think there’s artistry in the way he’s circumnavigated portions of the piece that he didn’t have time to perfect and in the way he fades into Beethoven, transitioning over with a bridge of his own design. It causes a stir in the room, a flurry of murmurs, quickly hushed.

“Who are you, really?” is all Gloria says, afterward.

He grins at her.

She hands him the sheet music to Schubert’s Grand Duo.

“An auspicious title,” he says.

“I’ve always thought so,” she replies.

He shut aching eyes on a Colorado Springs parking lot, filled with artificial light.

If Gloria hadn’t died, he wouldn’t find the idea of resonant frequencies mentally intolerable. Everything he’d tied to music was tied to her. And he was wired for music. The same way he was wired for math.

Given a piano, he could reproduce Alteran chords and reconstruct Ancient musical theory from their intervals. She’d have been a help. They could have collaborated. She’d have liked that. She’d’ve insisted. She’d inserted herself into everything. Like a key.

Eyes burning, he stares at the spread of his math, meticulously unfolding his thoughts, waiting for the flash of insight that accompanies transforming concepts like topologies.

The logical base and the lateral step: equally important.

Relativizing, natural, and algebrizing proofs have been insufficient. IP=PSPACE, which is heartening, but he’s coming to agree with the consensus in the field that arithmetization isn’t a workable approach to the P=NP proof.

“One in E minor runs through my head,” Gloria whispers in his ear.

He startles so violently that a slow avalanche of scholarly miscellanea hits the floor in a cascade of pens and paper he doesn’t see, he only hears, because he’s closed his eyes in a vain attempt to calm down.

“Sorry, sweetheart.” Her hands close over his shoulders and she slides between him and the back of the chair, pressing herself into his back as she straddles the wood in a position that can’t be comfortable. Sympathetically, she kisses his ear. “You make it so easy.”

“Yes well,” he says, defenseless.

“You wouldn’t survive in a hunter-gatherer society.” She hooks her chin over his shoulder and wraps her arms around him. “Some mastodon would come by and eat you while you were inventing the lever.”

“Don’t think mastodons ate primitive man.” He looks hopelessly at the disordered admixture of paper and writing implements on the floor. It mirrors the conceptual disorder in his thoughts. He frowns, thinking of entropy.

“Yes,” Gloria says, “I’m sure primitive woman was much more delicious.”

“Hmm.”

“You realize you look a bit mental in here in the dark, don’t you?” She finger-combs his hair. “Why didn’t you turn the lights on when the sun went down?”

He frowns. But she’s right. The fading day has all but gone. The light from the hall and from his open laptop is hardly enough to see by.

She makes a sympathetic sound and drapes herself around him. “Make me supper, you ludicrous man.” Her hair cascades over his shoulder, long and gold and glorious. 

He rallies, redirecting his focus, settling his nerves. “I’m afraid I’ll need some kind of quid pro quo.”

“I can offer a stylish and necessary haircut. After dinner.”

“I fail to see how such a thing would benefit me. You’re the one who has to look at it.”

“Only your remarkable hair and notable wardrobe prevent you from sucking the life from your seminar students.”

“Regardless of the state of my hair,” he says dryly, “they’d do well to be revising, as they sit their Discrete Maths final tomorrow.”

“Then it is most assuredly time for a haircut,” Gloria pronounces.

He’ll have to do it alone. He’ll have to do it without her. He knows this. (He’s known it all along.)

It’ll be easier with a piano.

Once he’s worked out the chords, he’ll recreate the polyphonic textures he heard on Altera. With that as groundwork, he’ll map correspondences between software and hardware, language and code.

It’ll be easier with a piano. (It’s always been easier with a piano.)

A-flat major and a triplet rhythm. Number eight in C minor. Opus thirteen. She sits next to him. Right there on the bench, but not facing the keys. Facing the room. She doesn’t speak. Not until he finishes the second movement.

Her voice is small. “Have you looked into the statistics yet?” 

“No,” he says. “Not yet.”

“I—” She stops. Stares at the opposite wall.

He stares at the keys, light and dark.

“I’m not sure you should.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you the bits you need to know. The clinical options aren’t difficult to navigate; they’re all algorithmically optimized. Not much to choose, really.”

Medicine’s never struck him as particularly rigorous. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“The doctor explained it to me. She was lovely. Randomized clinical trials determine recommended pathways. It’s all very precise. Straightforward.” Gloria shrugs, her pose casual, her voice wavering. “And you’re so busy.”

“Ridiculous,” he snaps, hurt.

She flinches.

“That’s ridiculous,” he repeats, but he’s afraid it’s not ridiculous at all.

She turns away. She does that when she cries. He wants to leave, so that the turned-away curve of her shoulders doesn’t carve itself into him. But he doesn’t leave. He can hold himself together for this. For her. He’s not turned so civilized that he’s forgotten who he is. Where he came from.

“I’m not—” he begins, inadequate, guilty. “I don’t want you to think I—” He trails off into a morass of self-loathing.

“There’s no need to look into any of it.” Her voice is high and tight and now he knows she’s crying.

He slides laterally, bracing her shoulder with his own.

He faces the piano.

She faces the void of the room.

“Why not?” He says the thing he should have said the first time.

“It doesn’t look good,” she admits.

He nods. It must look extremely bad.

“But those numbers are just numbers,” she whispers through tears.

He doesn’t trust himself to say anything in response to that.

“They don’t mean anything,” she says.

They mean something extraordinarily, excruciatingly specific, actually. He knows better than to say as much aloud.

“Population-level statistics don’t translate perfectly to individual cases,” she says, quoting, no doubt, her physician.

“True,” he admits.

This seems to reassure her. It doesn’t reassure him.

He threaded his fingers through his hair, trapping chunks of it as he made a fist and pressed it to his temple.

He was nearly done.

He had to be.

Sound, like a storm, gathered on the edges of his thoughts.

Perhaps Jackson was right. Perhaps he should take a break. Go to Atlantis. He could work with Sheppard. (He liked Sheppard; with his quiet tenacity, his genuine joy in maths, and his strange, sad love for the strange, sad city Rush would only ever dream of.)

Perhaps Telford was right. Perhaps he should burn through the math and what remained of his personality. Go wherever the Icarus Project went. He could work with Telford. (He liked Telford; with his savage drive and his hard eyes and his endless, boundless press toward horizons difficult to conceive of.)

A-flat major and a triplet rhythm. Number eight in C minor. Opus thirteen. He’s trying to get it out of his head, but it won’t go.

“You’ve been playing Beethoven lately.” Gloria’s in the doorway, putting a mild gloss on his unremitting obsession with the Sonata Pathétique. “I get suspicious when that happens.”

“Suspicious?” he says.

“Extremely.” She doesn’t explain herself. In the dim light of the room, he doesn’t have to see how frail she’s become.

Rush abandoned the window and sank to the floor, his back against his overpainted wall, the newest cypher in dark relief above him. He propped an elbow on his knee, pressed the heel of one hand against his temple, and listened to the wind.

“Nick,” she says, pale against pale sheets, “what happened to your brother?”

He looks out the window, across a white expanse of snow blanketing Rochester, Minnesota. It glitters in the moonlight. Reflected in the window, her wig, dark and artificially perfect, glosses void over an icy landscape. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” Her voice cracks. She tries again. “It matters to me very much.”

“Why?” He doesn’t look at her. Already, he’s chasing chevrons, chasing cyphers and gates and spacetime tears and other things on the flash drive David Telford had given him months ago.

“Because I don’t want to be like him,” she says.

He shuts his eyes.

“Like who?” he asks, when he can speak.

“Never mind,” she whispers.

It’s a long time before he can turn away from the window. When he finally does, she’s watching him.

“Come on, sweetheart,” she says. “Let’s go down to the lobby and be unforgivably posh. You can replace the mediocre volunteer pianist.”

She can’t hide her fear from him. It bothers him that she tries.

He steps forward, extends his hands, and pulls her out of her hospital bed.

Sitting on the floor, he reached overhead and drew a line beneath his previous work. He wrote: “do NOT repaint” coupled with an up-vectored arrow, in case he forgot. Then he swapped the marker for something with a finer tip.

He drew a series of five parallel horizontal lines along the wall at the level of his eyes.

Humanity’s musical notation might need altering.

Lightly, precisely, he placed his hands on paint-spattered wood at the base of the wall. All ten fingertips touched the floorboards.

He lies on his back, looking up at the dimly lit ceiling. It’s not dark here. It’s never dark here. It’s never quiet, and he doesn’t sleep. “You can take it off, you know,” he murmurs into the smell of artificial hair. “This thing.” He tugs gently on the smooth, even, brown lengths, but not enough to displace the wig.

“I know.” She lies atop him, and her weight, too little now, presses into him.“But I don’t like to.”

“Yes well,” he traces the sinusoidal dips and rises of the bones of her spine, “you’ve always been terribly vain, sweetheart.”

“It comes with the profession.” She smiles against his shoulder.

He feels like he’s the one dying. He wishes he were.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Fine,” she replies. “Tomorrow I’ll feel wretched.”

“I know.”

They’re quiet. She breathes so softly it’s difficult to tell if she’s asleep.

“Nick,” she says. “You haven’t forgotten him? Your brother?”

He can’t control his facial expression, and he hopes she’s not looking at him. “No,” he says, when he can force sound past the locked gate of his vocal chords.

“You won’t forget me?” she whispers.

He can’t answer, but his arms tighten around her.

Quiet in his quiet rooms, just loud enough to outcompete the night wind, he whistled a C major scale. He played it out along the floor, synchronizing pitch and finger movements. 

This would be fine.

(This would be workable.)

“Whistle me an A, darling, someone walked off with my tuner.”

“Admit it.” He doesn’t look up. “You married me for my ear.”

“You married me for my hair; I don’t see the difference.”

“I did NOT marry you for your hair.” He doesn’t look up from the exam in his hands, but he whistles her an A.

“You’re a terrible liar, sweetheart.”

And now, he does look up.

Gloria leans in the doorway, her violin tucked beneath one arm, unforgivably fragile with her dark hair, her dark sweater. She gives him a half smile. “You don’t like it at all.”

“I like it,” he counters. “I do. It’s very, ah—fashionable?” He looks down at the exams he’s grading.

“Now you’re just guessing. As if you have any idea what’s fashionable.”

“Untrue. Have you seen these?” He taps the frames of his glasses. “The envy of the Mathematics Department.”

She huffs. “You can’t consistently identify the difference between a dress and a skirt, let alone—”

“Right, and that was one time. Years back. You’ll never be letting that one go, will you?”

“Not planning on it, no.”

He doesn’t look up, but he knows she’s still there, in the doorway, watching him.

“It’s not that I don’t like the thing.” He wishes he could look at her, but knows he can’t. He can’t. “I miss the blonde, is all.”

“It’ll grow back.”He sees her in his peripheral vision, fingering the strands of her wig.

“Of course,” he says. “Of course it will.”

He scans sightlessly through the exam beneath his hands, steeling himself, but, when he looks up, the doorway is dark and she is gone.

Through the night and early hours of the morning, he sat on the floor of his unpacked apartment, windows open, listening to the wind, his mind full of chords, intervals, pitches that seemed to’ve been planted in his mind.

At seven o’clock, the parking lot was an uninspired gray, the distant mountains were a hopeless umber, and Young was likely awake.

He needed a piano; Young could make that happen.

There must be pianos in Colorado Springs.

After a blind sweep of his hand through his hair, he stood. It was an effort to leave the not-piano he’d imagined in his floor, an effort to walk down the hall, an effort to knock, to keep knocking when no one answered; the wait was interminable, musical pressure was building in his thoughts, he—

Young, sleep-rumpled, flung his door open. “Little early for you, isn’t it? Thought we were doing brunch.” The man’s speech slowed as he took in Rush’s appearance.

Rush looked back at him, noting the T-shirt, the bare feet, the cotton pants patterned with subtle blue plaid. 

Perhaps it was the weekend.

“Why don’t you come in,” Young said.

“I don’t need to come in,” Rush clarified, “I need a piano.”

“Come in,” Young said again, and ushered Rush inside.