Written in 1999.
SF Age
, October 1999
This is a story I always wanted to write. As a math professor, I’ve had a lot of occasion to meditate about Pythagoras. He’s a very shadowy historical figure, and the stories about him which survive are miracle tales, many of which are incorporated into this story. In February of 1999, I visited Paul Di Filippo at his home in Providence, and he helped me to finally get a Pythagoras story done.
I have five of the
apeiron
beings, because I think of mathematics as having core concepts: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity and Information. These correspond to, respectively, the Tangled Tree, the Braided Worm, the Bristle Cat, the Swarm of Eyes and the Crooked Beetle. The Crooked Beetle is also our old friend the Mandelbrot Set. The creatures also represent, again in the same order, Earth, Water, Fire, Air and the Cosmos.
When the woman from Endless Media called, Wendel was out on the fake balcony, looking across San Pablo Bay at the lights of the closed-down DeGroot Chemicals Plant. On an early summer evening, the lights marking out the columns of steel and the button-shaped chemical tanks took on an unreal glamour; the plant became an otherworldly palace. He’d tried to model the plant with the industrial-strength Real2Graphix program his dad had brought home from RealTek before he got fired. But Wendel still didn’t know the tricks for filling a virtual scene with the world’s magic and menace, and his model looked like a cartoon toy. Someday he’d get his chops and make the palace come alive. You could set a killer-ass game there if you knew how. After high school, maybe he could get into a good gaming university. He didn’t want to “go” to an online university if he could help it; virtual teachers, parallel programmed or not, couldn’t answer all your questions.
The phone rang just as he was wondering whether Dad could afford to pay tuition for someplace real. He waited for his dad to get the phone, and after three rings he realized with a chill that Dad had probably gone into a pocket, and he’d have to answer the phone himself.
The fake porch, created for window washers, and to create an impression of coziness the place had always lacked, creaked under his feet as he went to climb through the window. The narrow splintery wooden walkway outside their window was on the third floor of an old waterfront motel converted to studio apartments. Their tall strip of windows, designed to savor a view that was now unsavory, looked down a crumbling cliff at a mud beach, the limp gray waves sluggish in stretched squares of light from the buildings edging the bluff. Down the beach some guys with flashlights were moving around, looking for the little pocket-bubbles that floated in like dead jellyfish. Thanks to the accident that had closed down the DeGroot Research Center, beyond the still-functioning chemicals plant, San Pablo Bay was a good spot to scavenge for pocket-bubbles, which was why Wendel and his dad had ended up living here.
To get to the phone, he had to skirt the mercury-like bubble of Dad’s pocket, presently a big flattened shape eight feet across and six high, rounded like a river stone. The pocket covered most of the available space on the living room floor, and he disliked having to touch it. There was that sensation when you touched them—not quite a sting, not quite an electrical shock, not even intolerable. But you didn’t want to prolong the feeling.
Wendel touched the speakerphone tab. “Hello, Bell residence.”
“Well this doesn’t sound like Rothman Bell.” It was a woman’s voice coming out of the speakerphone; humorous, ditzy, but with a heartening undercurrent of business.
“No ma’am, I’m his son Wendel.”
“That’s right, I remember he had a son. You’d be about fourteen now?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen! Whoa. Time jogs on. This is Manda Solomon. I knew your dad when he worked at MetaMeta. He really made his mark there. Is he home?”
He hesitated. There was no way to answer that question honestly without having to admit Dad was in a pocket, and pocket-slugs had a bad reputation. “No ma’am. But …”
He looked toward the pocket. It was getting smaller now. If things went as usual, it would shrink to grapefruit size, then swell back up and burst—and Dad would be back. Occasionally a pocket might bounce through two or three or even a dozen shrink-and-grow cycles before releasing its inhabitant, but it never took terribly long, at least from the outside. Dad might be back before this woman hung up. She sounded like business, and that made Wendel’s pulse race. It was a chance.
If he could just keep her talking. After a session in a pocket Dad wouldn’t be in any shape to call anyone back, sometimes not for days—but if you caught him just coming out, and put the phone in his hand, he might keep it together long enough, still riding the pocket’s high. Wendel just hoped this wasn’t going to be the one pocket that would finally kill his father.
“Can I take a message, Ms., um …” With his mind running so fast he’d forgotten her name.
“Manda Solomon. Just tell him …”
“Can I tell him where you’re calling from?” He grimaced at himself in the mirror by the front door. Dumbass, don’t interrupt her, you’ll scare her off.
“From San Jose, I’m a project manager at Endless Media. Just show him—oh, have you got iTV?”
“Yeah. You want me to put it on?” Good, that’d take some more time. If Dad had kept up the payments.
He carried the phone over to the iTV screen hanging on the wall like a seascape; there was a fuzzy motel-decor photo of a sunset endlessly playing in it now, the kitschy orange clouds swirling in the same tape-looping pattern. He tapped the tab on the phone that would hook it to the iTV, and faced the screen so that the camera in the corner of the frame could pick him up but only on head-shot setting so she couldn’t see the pocket too. “You see me?”
“Yup. Here I come.”
Her picture appeared in a window in an upper corner of the screen, a pleasant looking redhead in early middle age, hoop earrings, frank smile. She held up an e-book, touched the page turner which instantly scrolled an image of a photograph that showed a three-dimensional array of people floating in space, endless pairs of people spaced out into the nodes of a warped jungle-gym lattice, a man and a woman at each node. Wendel recognized the couple as his dad and his mother. At first it looked as if all the nodes were the same, but when you looked closer, you could see that the people at some of the more distant nodes weren’t Mom and Dad after all. In fact some of them didn’t even look like people. This must be a photo taken inside a pocket with tunnels coming out of it. Wendel had never seen it before. “If you print out the picture, he’ll know what it’s all about,” Manda was saying.
“Sure.” Wendel saved the picture to the iTV’s memory, hoping it would work. He didn’t want Manda to know their printer was broken and wouldn’t be repaired anytime soon.
“Well it’s been a sweet link but I gotta go—just tell him to call. Here’s the number, ready to save? Got it? Okay, then. He’ll remember me.”
Wendel saw she wasn’t wearing a wedding band. He got tired of taking care of Dad alone. He tried to think of some way to keep her on the line. “He’ll be right back—he’s way overdue. I expect him…”
“Whoops, I really gotta jam.” She reached toward her screen, then hesitated, her head cocked as she looked at his image. “That’s what it is: You look a lot like Jena, you know? Your mom.”
“I guess.”
“Jena was a zippa-trip. I hated it when she disappeared.”
“I don’t remember her much.”
“Oops, my boss is chiming hysterically at me. Bye!”
“Um—wait.” He turned to glance at the dull silvery bubble, already bouncing back from its minimum size, but when he turned back, Manda Solomon was gone and it was only the showy sunset again. “Shit.”
He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn’t feel anything but “stop,” with his sneaker on. It wasn’t like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you back toward your own time flow. Just “stopness.” It was saying “no” with the stuff of forever itself. There was no way to look inside it: once someone crawled in through a pocket’s navel, it sealed up all over.
He turned away, heard something—and when he looked back the pocket was gone and his dad, stinking and retching and raggedly bearded, was crawling toward him across the carpet.
-----
Next morning, it seemed to Wendel that his Dad sucked the soup down more noisily than ever before. His hands shook and he spilled soup on the blankets.
His dad was supposedly forty—but he looked fifty-five. He’d spent maybe fifteen years in the pockets—adding up to only a few weeks in outside time, ten minutes here and two hours there and so on.
Dad sat up in his bed, staring out to the bay, sloppily drinking the soup from a bowl, and Wendel had to look away. Sitting at the breakfast bar that divided the kitchenette from the rest of the room, he found himself staring at the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. They needed some kind of hamper, and he could go to some Martinez garage sale and find one next to free. But that was something Dad ought to do; Wendel sensed that if he once started doing that sort of thing, parental things, his dad would give a silent gasp of relief and lean on him, more and more; and paradoxically fall away from him, into the pockets.
“I was gone like—ten minutes world-time?” said Dad. “I don’t suppose I missed anything here in this…this teeming hive of activity.”
“Ten minutes?” said Wendel. He snorted. “You’re still gone, Dad. And, yes, there was a call for you. A woman from Endless Media. Manda Solomon. She left her number and a picture.”
“Manda?” said Dad. “That flake? Did you tell her I was in a pocket?”
“Right,” said Wendel contemptuously. “Like I told her my Dad’s a pocket-slug.”
Dad opened his mouth like he was going to protest the disrespect—then thought better of it. He shrugged, with as much cool as he could manage. “Manda’s down with pockets, Wendel. Half the guys programming virtual physics for MetaMeta were using them when I was there. Pockets are a great way to make a deadline. The MetaMeta crunch-room was like a little glen of chrome puff-balls. Green carpeting, you wave? Manda used to walk around setting sodas and pizzas down outside the pockets. We’d work in there for days, when it was minutes on the outside—get a real edge on the other programmers. She was just a support tech then. We called her Fairy Princess and we crunchers were the Toads of the Short Forest, popping out all loaded on the bubble-rush. Manda’s gone down in the world, what I heard, in terms of who she works for …”
“She’s a project manager. Better than a support tech.”
“Nice of her to think of me.” Dad made a little grimace. “Endless Media’s about one step past being a virtu-porn Webble. Where’s the picture she sent?”
“I saved it in the iTV,” said Wendel, and pushed the buttons to show it.
Dad made a groaning sound. “Turn it off, Wendel. Put it away.”
“Tell me what it is, first,” said Wendel, pressing the controller buttons to zoom in on the faces. It was definitely—
“Mom and me,” said Dad shakily. “I took that photo the week before she died.” His voice became almost inaudible. “Yeah. You can see…some of the images are different further into the lattice…because our pocket had a tunnel leading to other pockets. That happens sometimes, you know. It’s not a good idea to go down the tunnels. It was the time after this one that…Mom didn’t come back.” He looked at the picture for a moment; like its own pocket, the moment seemed to stretch out to a gray forever. Then he looked away. “Turn it off, will you? It brings me down.”
Wendel stared at his mother’s young face a moment longer, then turned off the image. “You never told me much about the time she didn’t come back.”
“I don’t need to replay the experience, kid.”
“Dad. I…look, just do it. Tell me.”
Dad stared at him. Looked away. Wendel thought he was going to refuse again. Then he shrugged and began, his voice weary. “It was a much bigger pocket than usual,” said Dad, almost inaudible. “MetaMeta…they’d scored a shitload of them from DeGroot and we were merging them together so whole teams could fit in. Using fundamental spacetime geometry weirdness to meet the marketing honcho’s deadlines, can you believe? I was an idiot to buy into it. And this last time Jena was mad at me and she flew away from me while we were in there. And then I couldn’t tell which of the lattice-nodes was really her. Like a mirror-maze in a funhouse. And meanwhile I’m all tweaked out of my mind on bubble-rush. But I had my laptop-harness and there was all that code-hacking to be done, and I got into it for sure, glancing over at all the Jenas now and then, and they’re programming too, so I thought it was OK, but then …” He swallowed, turning to look out the window, as if he might see her out there in the sky. “When the pocket flattened back out, I was alone. The same shit was coming down everywhere all of a sudden, and then there was the Big Bubble disaster at the DeGroot plant and all the pocket-bubbles were declared government property and if you want to use them anymore…people, you know… .” His voice trailed into a whisper: “They act like you’re a junkie.”
“Yeah,” said Wendel. “I know.” He looked out the window for a while. It was a sunny day, but the foulness in the water made the sea a dingy gray, as if it were brooding on dark memories. He spotted a couple of little pocket-bubbles floating in on the brackish waves. Dad had been buying them from beachcombers, merging them together till he got one big enough to crawl into again.
They’d talked about pockets in Wendel’s health class at school last term. In terms of dangerous things the grown-ups wanted to warn you away from, pockets were right up there with needles, drunk driving, and doing it bareback. You could stay inside too long and come out a couple of years older than your friends. You could lose your youth inside a pocket. Oddly enough, you didn’t eat or breathe in any conventional way while you were inside there—those parts of your metabolism went into suspension. The pocket-slugs dug this aspect of the high, for after all weren’t eating and breathing just another wearisome world-drag? There were even rock songs about pockets setting you free from “feeding the pig,” as the ‘slugs liked to call normal life. You didn’t eat or breathe inside a pocket but even so were still getting older, often a lot faster than you realized. Some people came out, like, middle-aged.