The Last Aerie (74 page)

But as he reached the door and opened it: “Nathan.” Chung glanced back at the other. “Do me a favour, will you?”

“If I can.”

“When you get back to Sunside—or even before you get back—get rid of that earring. Maglore, this Wamphyri mentalist of yours, he might have intended it as more than just a gift. I mean, you know what my talent is, how it works? I locate things, people as often as not. And it helps if I can lock onto something, such as Siggi Dam’s clasp, or an earring like the one in your ear.”

Nathan nodded. He understood Chung’s warning. “You think Maglore has the same sort of talent? That he might have been using me to spy on Sunside?”

“It’s just a hunch, but yes.”

Again Nathan’s nod, as his thoughts flew back once more to his own world. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Before the dawn, while Nathan dreamed, Sir Keenan Gormley got back to him. Siggi Dam wasn’t among the Great Majority. And if she was no longer in
this
world, there was only one other place she could be.

In his sleep Nathan sweated, tossed and turned, ground his teeth. His conversion to E-Branch and his new-found friends was now complete.

But Gormley had other news for him, too, and as Nathan’s resolve hardened, so his plans must be altered. Mobius was no longer in his grave in Leipzig; only his bones were there now; the still-brilliant mind had moved on, gone elsewhere. There
were
other worlds beyond.

It wasn’t quite a “dead end”, however. Hope hadn’t blinked out in its entirety along with Mobius; there were other incorporeal minds to contact, other mathematicians whose work in life had been just as enigmatic, just as metaphysical. Gormley had a whole list of them. Maybe Nathan should look some of them up instead.

Except … the old problem might still be there. The dead continued to shun living persons who could speak to them. It was the legacy of Nathan’s father; for he had opened the way for them, taught them to seek each other out in their loneliness, only to betray them in the end. The betrayal had worked both ways, it was true, but in that respect the dead could be forgiven. They didn’t share the freedom of the living. They were immobile; they couldn’t flee before the advance of a necromancer but must lie still and suffer his tortures; they were terrified by the thought that such as Dragosani—and, in the end, Harry Keogh—might return. By the thought that indeed one such might already have returned, in the shape of this man from another world. For they knew that Nathan was here, and as yet they feared him.

And so, as Nathan’s resolve hardened more yet, his sleeping form grew still and calm again.

Calm, resentful, and cold.

Perhaps even as cold as his Necroscope father …

III

The Nightmare Zone

In his early days with E-Branch, the daily twenty-four hour round of life itself was probably Nathan’s greatest physical and mental distraction. In his own world, where around fifty Sunside/Starside cycles were equal to an entire “year” Earthtime, a day was the equivalent of four to five of this world’s entire day/night cycles! And yet the Traveller physiology had clung to its pre-holocaust rhythms as developed through Szgany evolution on the vampire world prior to the advent of the so-called “white sun”, and the typical Traveller would sleep as often as three times—five or six hours a time—during the course of one long Sunside night.

Here when it grew dark, one slept—and only one sleep, which would normally only be broken to answer calls of nature or duty—then woke up with the dawn. As for the impossibly short days: it seemed astonishing that these people had ever found time to achieve anything. Yet what they had achieved was itself amazing. Nathan could scarcely begin to consider the extent of their science without his mind reeling from the sheer scope of it!

In fact he was suffering a form of trans-dimensional jet-lag, where his body was desperately trying to adjust to time-scales and—differentials far beyond the experience of any Sunside Traveller since time immemorial. But that wasn’t the worst of it; something else he must get used to was the foul weather. The seasons on Sunside had varied only marginally over four-year periods, when the climatic changes were so slow and slight as to be almost unnoticeable. Here in the so-called “hell-lands”, however—especially London in the winter—the weather was hell! Not as bad as Perchorsk and the lands around, but bad enough by any standards. At least in Perchorsk the temperature had been more or less constant, and the mountain ravines natural as opposed to the man-made canyons of the city.

Nathan had never had a cold in his life—until now! His nostrils had never before clogged up—until he breathed the fumes rising out of the underground stations. The efficiency of his digestive system, his bowels and the solid consistency of their contents had never been in question—until he ate with Ben Trask at various Chinese and Indian restaurants.

All in all, life was uncomfortable here. It wasn’t at all the world he’d envisioned as a stuttering loner in Settlement, when all he’d wanted was to escape into his own worlds of fantasy. But at the same time it wasn’t quite hell, and when the drizzly, dreary nights came down he didn’t have to hide from monsters. Unless they were monsters out of his own past, his own memory.

Nathan’s most recent monster was Turkur Tzonov, but at least he wasn’t Wamphyri (though well he might have been, if what E-Branch suspected of him were the truth). Separated from Tzonov by many thousands of miles, Nathan couldn’t hit at the man personally, but he could do his best to damage his organization, ruin his planned conquest of Sunside/Starside. If not in this world, then certainly in his own. But to do that, and also to avenge if not save Siggi Dam, he must first get back to his own world, and take with him all the weapons he could muster.

Nathan’s best weapon, Trask had assured him, would be Nathan himself. But a Nathan trusted by the teeming dead, and one who commanded the metaphysical Mobius Continuum as his father before him. With this in mind he applied himself yet more diligently to his studies, specifically the elusive and seemingly meaningless science of mathematics. And as the first ten days flew by his progress was such that he could be proud of it.

As his instructor explained to Ben Trask on the morning of the eleventh day: “He seems to have a natural talent for it, an intuitive grasp of maths. At first I couldn’t be sure; he was reluctant, easily sidetracked. But now … well, it could be you’ll soon have to replace me. My knowledge goes only so far.”

Trask looked at the other across his desk. James Bryant was perhaps the perfect stereotype. Small and slender, studious in grey slacks and dark polo-necked pullover, blinking owlishly behind thick-lensed spectacles, he just
had
to teach something or other, preferably maths. The Minister Responsible had pulled him in from one of the universities where his term of office had just run out. But Bryant’s mind wasn’t one-track; it wasn’t bound by his subject. He had known from the start, even without the Official Secrets Act, that E-Branch was no ordinary government department, and Nathan no ordinary student. And this morning, for some reason or other, he appeared to have reached the end of his tether.

“Just how far does your knowledge go?” Trask asked him. “I mean, we’ve scarcely had time to talk to each other, let alone get to know one another. I know you were at… where, Oxford? Our Minister wouldn’t have recommended you for the job if you weren’t worth your salt.”

Bryant nodded. “Do you know what maths is, Mr. Trask? Its definition? Roughly, it’s the logical study of quantity or magnitude. It uses rigorously defined concepts and self-consistent symbols in such a way as to disclose the properties and relations of quantities and magnitudes within its own parameters. It can be applied or abstract, can make connections or remain purely theoretical. Do you follow?”

Trask nodded, then shook his head. “I’m no mathematician, Mr. Bryant. I follow you, but I don’t follow you—if you follow me. Yes, I know Einstein’s famous equation, but that’s not to say I understand it. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, what’s troubling you?”

“Teaching Nathan is what’s troubling me, because I can’t teach him what he wants to know. Because maths won’t cover it. May I explain?”

“Go ahead.”

“Let’s look at that definition of maths again. The first word we come across is logical. Nathan’s application is hardly logical. He wants to be able to ‘conjure doors’! He believes that if he can frame or control a certain equation or series of equations, then these ‘doors’” (Bryant offered a baffled shrug) “will appear. The physical out of the abstract.”

Taking a deep breath, Trask shook his head. “Not the physical, but the metaphysical, certainly. And surely metaphysical and abstract aren’t incompatible.”

“Exactly,” said Bryant. “Except I’m not dealing with metaphysics … though it strikes me that you are!” And remembering some of the things he’d seen in this place during the past fortnight, he glanced around the office. “But men can’t
think
doors into existence, Mr. Trask. Or for that matter anything else.”

Trask wanted to say:
Nathan’s father could
, but somehow managed to keep his peace. “Men can think thoughts into existence,” he said, without meaning to be clever. “But I take your point, so do go on.”

Zek Föener came to Trask’s office door, looked inside and made to turn away. Trask called out to her. “Zek? It’s OK. Come in.” And to Bryant: “Please carry on. This is interesting.”

Bryant looked at Zek, shrugged and said, “Good morning. I was just explaining to Mr. Trask why I can’t go on working with Nathan.”

She smiled and said, “I’d like to hear that. Any insight has to be better than none. Most have been favourable, but all opinions count.”

“My ‘opinion’ is that he’s a nice lad,” Bryant told her. “It isn’t that I don’t like him, only that I can’t work with him.” He turned back to Trask. “Back to the definition: rigorously defined concepts and self-consistent symbols. Mathematics doesn’t mutate. It grows, certainly, gets more complex the deeper we delve, but even to a computer a plus is a plus and a minus is a minus. Nathan wants to bend maths; if rules don’t say what he wants them to say, he bends them.”

“Isn’t that what rules are for?” Zek frowned. “I mean, didn’t we once believe that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line? And wasn’t it maths that showed us we were wrong? Wasn’t it maths that “bent” the line and threw us a curve?”

And Trask thought:
But here in E-Branch we know that the shortest distance between two points is in /act a Mobius door! And I personally have seen Harry Keogh disappear through just such a door!
While out loud he said:

“Is it such a bad thing that Nathan is trying to create his own system with its own rules? Why shouldn’t he look at numbers from all directions? As Zek said: isn’t that what rules are for anyway, so that people who are clever enough can bend them?”

“Not the rules of mathematics, no,” Bryant disagreed. And quickly went on: “Look, let’s get to the point. The deeper I go with Nathan the less certain I am of my ground. Soon I won’t know if he’s playing fair with me or if he’s … well, bending the rules. If he is, he won’t learn anything. Not from me, anyway. So there’s little point in my trying to teach him.”

“Then maybe you should try learning
from
him. Is that what you’re trying to say: that he’s outstripping you?”

Bryant shook his head, his frustration beginning to show. “I’m not jealous of him … Not yet, anyway.”

“Maybe we should get another instructor, then? Someone who knows it all?”

“No one ‘knows it all,’ Mr. Trask. It just gets more complex, that’s all. My suggestion: from now on let him do his own thing, without outside help or hindrance. That way, as soon as he discovers that numbers simply are—that they don’t govern anything except themselves—he’ll stop fooling with them. Then, with his … well, I can only call it “intuition”, he’ll probably go on to make a very capable mathematician.”

Trask took a chance. “You know of course that we
want
him to find his doors?”

“I guessed as much, yes,” Bryant answered. “Also that you are dealing with some pretty weird stuff around here. Metaphysics? You as good as admitted it just a moment ago.” There was a mildly scornful something in his tone that Trask, despite that he was sympathetic, didn’t much care for. And:

“Pick a number,” Trask said. “Any number between one and a million.”

“A trick?”

“A demonstration.”

Bryant sighed and said, “I have it.” And Trask glanced at Zek. The merest glance, but she knew what he wanted. And smiling, she said: “All the nines. 999,999.”

Bryant frowned, said: “How …?”

“I bent the rules,” she told him. “The ones that guarantee the privacy of your own mind. I’m a telepath. Which is only one of the rules that get bent around here.”